Bio: Mihir Bellare came to the Jacobs School in 1995, where he runs the Cryptography Group along with professors Bennet Yee, Russell Impagliazzo, and Daniele Micciancio. Before coming to UCSD, he was a research staff member at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technlogy in 1991, and his B.S. in mathematics from the California Institute of Technology. Bellare is a recipient of a David and Lucille Packard Foundation Fellowship in Science and Engineering, and an NSF CAREER Award in 1996.

Research:

Professor Bellare's research interests fall into two categories: Cryptography and computer security; and Complexity theory. With the former he is concerned with practice oriented provable security; secure protocols; authentication; MACs; key distribution; signatures; encryption; zero-knowledge; implementations. And with the latter, his focus is on interactive and probabilistically checkable proofs; applications of these to obtaining non-approximability results for optimization problems; complexity of zero-knowledge; randomness in protocols and algorithms; computational learning theory. Bellare is co-developer of the HMAC authentication algorithm, which has emerged as a standard, being adopted by the IETF IPSEC Internet Standard, ANSI X.9 keyed hash standard, and also used numerous products including BSAFE (RSA Data Security Corp.), SSL (3.0 and 3.1), S-HTTP, NetBSD, and CDSA from Hewlett-Packard Company. He is also co-developer of the OAEP encryption algorithm which is included in the IEEE P1363 draft standard and the RSA PKCS #1 v2.0 standard and co-developer of iKP, a family of electronic payment protocols that lead to MasterCard and Visa's SET.