Levchin Prize


The Levchin Prize for real-world cryptography is a prize given to people or organizations who are recognized for contributions to cryptography that have a significant impact on its practical use. The recipients are selected by the steering committee of the Real World Crypto academic conference run by the International Association for Cryptologic Research and announced at the RWC conference.
The award was established in 2015 by Max Levchin, a software engineer and businessman who co-founded the financial technology company PayPal, and first awarded in January 2016.
Two awards are presented every year, each on its own topic. While there is no formal rule, as of 2024 one of the two awards has recognized one or more individuals for theoretical advancements to cryptographic methods with a practical impact, while the other has recognized one or more individuals or an organization for either the construction of practical systems or practical advancements in cryptanalysis.

Recipients

The following table lists the recipients of the Levchin Prize.
YearRecipientContribution
2016Phil Rogaway“For groundbreaking practice-oriented research that has had exceptional impact on real-world cryptography.” This includes work on authenticated encryption and format-preserving encryption.
2016The miTLS team: Cedric Fournet, Karthikeyan Bhargavan, Alfredo Pironti, and Markulf Kohlweiss“For the analysis of TLS and the development of the project.”
2017Joan Daemen“For the development of AES and SHA3.”
2017Moxie Marlinspike and Trevor Perrin“For the development and wide deployment of the Signal protocol.”
2018Hugo Krawczyk“For the development of real-world cryptographic systems with strong security guarantees and proofs.” This includes work on IPsec, IKE, SSL/TLS, HMAC and HKDF.
2018The OpenSSL team“For dramatic improvements to the code quality of OpenSSL.”
2019Mihir Bellare“For outstanding contributions to the design and analysis of real-world cryptosystems, including the development of the random oracle model, Block [cipher mode of operation|modes of operation], HMAC, and models for key exchange.”
2019Eric Rescorla“For sustained contributions to the standardization of security protocols, and most recently the development and standardization of TLS 1.3.” Other work includes earlier versions of TLS and DTLS, WebRTC, ACME and QUIC, as well as co-founding Let's Encrypt.
2020Ralph Merkle“For fundamental contributions to the development of public key cryptography, hash algorithms, Merkle trees, and digital signatures.”
2020Xiaoyun Wang and Marc Stevens“For groundbreaking work on the security of collision resistant hash functions.”
2021Neal Koblitz and Victor Miller“For the invention of elliptic curve cryptography.”
2021Tor Project">Tor (network)">Tor Project“For continued development of the Tor system and the underlying cryptography.”
2022Don Coppersmith“For foundational innovations in cryptanalysis.”
2022Let's Encrypt“For fundamental improvements to the certificate ecosystem that provide free certificates for all.”
2023Vincent Rijmen“For co-designing the Advanced Encryption Standard.”
2023Paul Kocher“For pioneering work on side channel analysis.”
2024Anna Lysyanskaya and Jan Camenisch“For the development of efficient Anonymous Credentials”
2024Al Cutter, Emilia Käsper, Adam Langley, and Ben Laurie“For creating and deploying Certificate Transparency at scale”
2025Adi Shamir“For foundational contributions to symmetric and public key cryptography, cryptographic protocols, and the cryptanalysis of real-world ciphers.”
2025Emmanuel Thomé, Pierrick Gaudry, Paul Zimmermann“For developing CADO-NFS, an implementation of the Number Field Sieve for factorization and discrete log, and for continued factorization records|factorizations] and discrete log records.”