Vaikuntanathan Wins Godel Prize for Homomorphic Encryption Research

Rachel Gordon | MIT CSAIL News
June 07, 2022

MIT EECS professor and CSAIL principal investigator Vinod Vaikuntanathan, alongside collaborators, has been awarded the Godel prize for two papers on homomorphic encryption. The papers were highlighted for “transformative contributions to cryptography by constructing efficient fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) schemes.

This type of scheme enables a host of applications that lets us “securely outsource expensive computations to untrusted servers, and securely perform collaborative computations among multiple entities.”

The prize is given annually to outstanding papers in theoretical computer science – and Vaikuntanathan and his colleagues specifically have been noted for their “enormous impact on both theoretical and applied research.”