[HN Gopher] Michael Rabin has died
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Michael Rabin has died
Author : tkhattra
Score : 370 points
Date : 2026-04-15 18:07 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| adrian_b wrote:
| Michael O. Rabin had important contributions in many domains, but
| from a practical point of view the most important are his
| contributions to cryptography.
|
| After Ralph Merkle, Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman, Michael
| O. Rabin is the most important of the creators of public-key
| cryptography.
|
| The RSA team (Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman) is
| better known than Michael O. Rabin, but that is entirely due to
| marketing and advertising, because they founded a successful
| business.
|
| In reality the RSA algorithm is superfluous and suboptimal. If
| the RSA team had never discovered this algorithm, that would have
| had a null impact on the practice of cryptography. Public-key
| cryptography would have been developed equally well, because the
| algorithms discovered by Merkle, Diffie, Hellman and Rabin are
| necessary and sufficient.
|
| On the other hand, while without the publications of RSA,
| cryptography would have evolved pretty much in the same way,
| without the publications of Michael O. Rabin from the late
| seventies the development of public-key cryptography would have
| been delayed by some years, until someone else would have made
| the same discoveries.
|
| Together with Ralph Merkle, Michael O. Rabin was the one who
| discovered the need for secure cryptographic hash functions, i.e.
| one-way hash functions, which are now critical for many
| applications, including digital signatures. Thus Rabin is the one
| who has shown how the previously proposed methods of digital
| signing must be used in practice. For example, the original
| signing algorithm proposed by RSA could trivially be broken and
| it became secure only in the modified form described by Rabin,
| i.e. with the use of a one-way hash function.
|
| Originally, Merkle defined 2 conditions for one-way hash
| functions, of resistance to first preimage attacks and second
| preimage attacks, while Rabin defined 1 condition, of resistance
| to collision attacks. Soon after that it was realized that all 3
| conditions are mandatory, so the 2 definitions, of Merkle and of
| Rabin, have been merged into the modern definition of such hash
| functions.
|
| Unfortunately, both Merkle and Rabin have overlooked a 4th
| condition, of resistance to length extension attacks. This should
| have always been included in the definition of secure hash
| functions.
|
| Because this 4th condition was omitted, the US Secure Hash
| Algorithm Standards defined algorithms that lack this property,
| which has forced many applications to use workarounds, like the
| HMAC algorithm, which for many years have wasted time and energy
| wherever encrypted communications were used, until more efficient
| authentication methods have been standardized, which do not use
| one-way hash functions, for instance GCM, which is today the most
| frequently used authentication algorithm on the Internet.
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| Nobody has hidden the history of contributions of Rabin to
| cryptography or computer science.
|
| He is a Turing Award winner.
| jonstewart wrote:
| I would argue that nondeterministic finite automata are both
| more significant and more practical.
| tptacek wrote:
| They didn't really found a successful business. They founded a
| middling business that didn't do much but license a patent
| until Security Dynamics, a smart card company, bought them and
| took over the name.
| YZF wrote:
| The story that I remember going around is that they each made
| some millions of dollars. That was a lot of money at the time
| for academics. I audited a cryptography course given by Adi
| Shamir in the early 90's and you couldn't tell he was rich
| though.
| tptacek wrote:
| I mean, I'm sure it turned out great for them, but their
| reputation definitely isn't rooted in their business
| acumen.
| YZF wrote:
| I think you're vastly underplaying the importance of RSA to
| cryptography. Personally it was the first time I was exposed to
| the concept of public key cryptography (in the 1980's). "would
| have been delayed by some years" is very dismissive. The same
| thing can be said of many inventions. Yet someone is/was the
| inventor.
|
| RSA were the first to provide a practical and easy to
| understand implementation and that had a huge impact in
| practice.
|
| That's not to downplay Rabin's or others contribution. That RSA
| pursued a certain commercial strategy that you may or may not
| like is not really relevant.
| thraxil wrote:
| I took his Introduction to Cryptography class when he was a
| visiting professor at Columbia. Absolute master of an old-school
| chalkboard lecturer. They don't make them like that any more.
| medina wrote:
| Hugely engaging, the margins of my notebook had many of his
| quips... there was an archive online somewhere.
|
| e.g., x minus x is zero, even for Euler, so therefore...
|
| Found on Archive,
| https://web.archive.org/web/20210509160248/http://www.eecs.h...
| arbuge wrote:
| I know him from Harvard and came here to say pretty much the
| same thing. RIP.
| ishi wrote:
| I took his Computability class in the Hebrew University. He
| got angry that students were often late to class, and said
| that this never happened in Harvard...
| ignoramous wrote:
| Any of his "chalkboard" lectures (preferably in English) in
| open archives of these universities? YouTube searches only
| bring up Prof Rabin's lectures aided by slides and
| presentation (ex:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thK_qJqx5mo at Tel Aviv Uni
| / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCX0Ut0hcWw at Harvard).
| YZF wrote:
| There's a chalkboard here (used ~44:50):
|
| Cryptography and Preventing Collusion in Second Price
| (Vickery) Auctions - Michael Rabin
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cmCBVrVQqc
|
| No chalkboard but more lectures
|
| https://youtu.be/nbePExzSTQ0?si=KkTbwfwj5rMtQUhD&t=681 -
| ply tvrt hhtspnvt vyyshvmyh lthlykym pynnsyym (The
| wonders of cryptography and financial applications)
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_LG5Hcc8mM - Lecture 7 -
| Zero Knowledge Proofs and Applications Michael Rabin
|
| For those interested in searching for more here's a
| Hebrew search string you can use: "prvpsvr mykl rbyn
| hrtsh" interesting enough Google and YT search yield
| results in English and Hebrew but possibly different ones
| than just searching in English.
|
| EDIT: One more:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30wkb46BE1k
| opem wrote:
| It's hard to imagine how a single person managed to accomplish so
| much. RIP to the great soul :|
| tclancy wrote:
| Seriously. After reading, I scrolled through his Known For
| section and thought, "Alright already, leave something for
| everybody else to work on."
| puttycat wrote:
| @dang this deserves a black ribbon
| d-cc wrote:
| What is a black ribbon?
| vardump wrote:
| Probably meant black HN top bar.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| An HN website tweak as a sign of respect on the passing of
| notable contributors to the tech world:
|
| <https://blog.willmeye.rs/whos-received-a-black-bar/>
| wk_end wrote:
| "@dang" doesn't do anything last I heard (though at this point
| it's used often enough that maybe the HN folks should consider
| it). If you want to reach the mods you can contact
| hn@ycombinator.com I believe.
| eranation wrote:
| I did.
| snitty wrote:
| May his memory be a blessing.
| AlecBG wrote:
| First sentence starts with horrible antisemitism. Can someone fix
| it? (on my phone with kids so not in a position to)
| codingrightnow wrote:
| It's been fixed.
| fakedang wrote:
| Still up. Looks like this is going to be another game of hit
| the hedgehog.
| metmac wrote:
| People keep adding different slurs. Awful and disgraceful.
| riddlemethat wrote:
| Anti-Jew rhetoric is at a level unseen since WW2. It's
| the new normal. It's horrible.
| dbwkdofpqndjflf wrote:
| Yeah, I come into contact with some form of Jewish hate
| on a literal daily basis now. It's been this way for
| months.
| nothrabannosir wrote:
| *It's the old normal :(
| lambda wrote:
| The article has now been been semi-protected to prevent
| vandalism by anonymous users.
| prmoustache wrote:
| I had a look at the history of todays edits and it is
| appalling.
| redwood wrote:
| Indeed I just figured out how to view them. Wow. https://
| en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Michael_O._Rabin&...
| zerocrates wrote:
| An admin has now semi-protected the article.
| welldoneator wrote:
| Thank you! I'm a casual user of Wikipedia but after this
| thread I went through the history of edits on the article
| and...oh my.
|
| I have a greater appreciation for folks like you and the
| other editors who seem to be constantly removing this type of
| stuf. Some truly horrendous slurs there.
| harel wrote:
| I used to regularly donate to the wikimedia foundation every
| year. I stopped doing that as I find the whole project is now a
| political tool and cannot be relied on. Even ignoring vandalism
| like here, sometimtes the same articles get different meanings
| depending on the language you view them in.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Different language editions of Wikipedia are completely
| different projects, with distinct user bases. You're never
| looking at the "same" article across languages.
| harel wrote:
| In that case, Wikipedia should not link to them (and even
| distance themselves from the edition) if they purposefully
| change the content of the article to suit a political
| agenda. The whole thing became a death match arena of
| factions as mature as 12 year old kids playing an actual
| death match arena game... This example here just
| demonstrates my point.
| blovescoffee wrote:
| Wikipedia has demonstrably been ravaged by anti-semitism. Feel
| free to ignore any of the notes here about Israel / anti-
| Israeli sentiment which I understand is not clear cut. There's
| demonstrably antisemitic coalitions editing wikipedia en-masse.
|
| https://www.adl.org/resources/report/editing-hate-how-anti-i...
| ogogmad wrote:
| The ADL labels all opponents of Israel as anti-semitic. They
| don't speak for Jewish people. Their smears help Israel by
| hurting Jews, so that Zionists can point to Israel as their
| only refuge. Helping Israel in turn hurts countless other
| people who are not Jewish, which Zionists mostly don't care
| about because Zionists are mostly ethno-centric, full of
| self-pity, regurgitate predictable lies about Israel's
| history without doing any critical investigation of their
| own, and have absolutely no principles. You are amplifying
| this.
|
| I know this because I've grown up around them. I used to be
| on their side until I found out that they lied to me about
| certain events - and to such a degree that they swapped
| around victim and perpetrator. They told me that the Gazans
| blew up greenhouses when the Israeli settlers left, because
| of their insane hatred of Jews. _Then_ I found out that the
| only people who blew up any greenhouses were the Israeli
| settlers - and that there was even a website set up solely to
| rebut the claim that the Gazans did it. Then I found out that
| Zionists didn 't care, because of a long litany of grievances
| that had nothing to do with Palestinians. Then most of them
| voted for a government that put Ben Gvir in charge of the
| police force and prisons. Then they passed on a chance to use
| diplomatic pressure to get Hamas to step down after the 07/10
| attack, without launching a vengeful massacre in Gaza.
| XCSme wrote:
| I loved implementing the Rabin-Karp algoritm, such a fun and
| celever solution.
| maxtaco wrote:
| Amazing man, with many important contributions over a very long
| career. The Rabin Cryptosystem (like RSA, but with public
| exponent 2) is notable for two reasons. First, unlike RSA, it is
| provably as hard as "factorization" (as he would call it), and
| second, unlike RSA, it wasn't protected by patent.
| xorvoid wrote:
| Thank you Michael Rabin for your excellent work. Rest in Peace.
|
| Rabin Fingerprinting is one of my favorites of his contributions.
| It's a "rolling hash" that allows you to quickly compute a 32-bit
| (or larger) hash at *every* byte offset of a file. It is used
| most notably to do file block matching/deduplication when those
| matching blocks can be at any offset. It's tragically
| underappreciated.
|
| I've been meaning to write up a tutorial as part of my Galois
| Field series. Someday..
|
| Thank you again!
| jonhohle wrote:
| I recently found his fingerprint algorithm and wrote a utility
| that uses it to find duplicate MIPS code for decompilation[0]
| and build unique identifiers that can be used to find
| duplicates without sharing any potentially copyrighted data[1].
|
| This replaced some O(n2) searches through ASCII text, reducing
| search time from dozens of seconds to fractions of a second.
|
| 0 - https://github.com/ttkb-oss/mipsmatch 1 -
| https://github.com/ttkb-oss/mipsmatch/wiki/Identifiers
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| I'm working on a data annotation system based around Rabin
| fingerprints. They're a really neat idea.
|
| I especially like how if you end up with hash characteristics
| that you don't like, your can just select a different
| irreducible Galois polynomial and now you've got a whole new
| hash algorithm. It's like tuning to a different frequency.
|
| For me it means I don't have to worry about cases where there
| aren't enough nearby fingerprints for the annotation to adhere
| to, I can just add or remove polynomials until I get a good
| density.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Important to note that FastCDC is about an order of magnitude
| for block deduplication and is generally considered the state
| of art for such an approach (speed of computing the hash is
| more important than absolutely optimal distribution of hashes).
| sidcool wrote:
| Doctoral advisor - Alonzo Church
| eranation wrote:
| TIL. Also just realized that Alan Turing was also one of
| Church's doctoral students. We stand on the shoulders of these
| giants.
| moralestapia wrote:
| _" As a young boy, he was very interested in mathematics and his
| father sent him to the best high school in Haifa, where he
| studied under mathematician Elisha Netanyahu, who was then a high
| school teacher."_
|
| Interesting. Some people are lucky enough to find their vocation
| quite early in life.
| redwood wrote:
| Wow hadn't heard of him
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elisha_Netanyahu
| moralestapia wrote:
| Yeah.
|
| Everything is intertwined at some level.
|
| Interesting.
| myth_drannon wrote:
| What a small world. But the entire extended family are
| professors. Too bad one became a politician.
| keybored wrote:
| Benzion?
|
| > Benzion Netanyahu ... A scholar of Judaic history, he was
| also an activist in the Revisionist Zionism movement, who
| lobbied in the United States to support the creation of the
| Jewish state.
| beagle3 wrote:
| Benzion's son (and Elisha's nephew) Benjamin Netanyahu is
| the Israeli prime minister.
| keybored wrote:
| Then there are at least two.
| nephihaha wrote:
| That's Benjamin Netanyahu's brother apparently.
|
| Sad that the only thing that shows up nowadays in searches
| tends to be Wikipedia. I miss the democratic internet with lots
| of quirky sites you could find with ease.
| jojomodding wrote:
| actually his uncle.
| ontouchstart wrote:
| Michael Rabin, 1976 ACM Turing Award Recipient
|
| https://youtu.be/L3FZzGU3n14
| seism wrote:
| That sly remark at 22:40 on the telephone ringing :)
| peterbonney wrote:
| I had the incredible good fortune to take one of his classes in
| college, and I loved it so much I took another just to learn from
| him again. A tremendous intellect AND an incredibly engaging and
| talented instructor. It would be an exaggeration to say that I
| knew him, but nevertheless he had a great impact on my education
| and my life. He will be missed.
| BrianneLee011 wrote:
| A founding father of computer science has passed away. Thank you
| for building the foundations that made modern AI possible.
| gchallen wrote:
| I took a course from him as a graduate student. I was not (and am
| still not) a theoretician. But I enjoyed the class and Professor
| Rabin's lectures.
|
| A friend of mine was one of his graduate students and a teaching
| assistant for the class. He pointed out to me once that Professor
| Rabin would state many of his points during lecture twice. Once I
| started listening more carefully, I found this to be true. It was
| both subtle and pedagogically effective.
|
| English was not his first language, but he enjoyed his struggles
| with it. I remember him stumbling over the pronunciation of a
| word during class. Giving up with a smile, he said, "This is a
| word I know only from books."
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