Victor Shoup

Timeline

1. 1983–1989

   Degrees in Wisconsin

   He completes a B.S. in computer science at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire in 1983 and an M.S. in computer science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1985. A Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison follows in 1989, with Eric Bach advising the thesis Removing Randomness from Computational Number Theory.

2. 1990–2015

   The NTL number theory library

   He begins NTL in 1990, an open-source C++ library that puts FFT-based polynomial arithmetic into practice for exact polynomials over finite fields and the integers. In 2015 he receives the Richard D. Jenks Memorial Prize for NTL, and the library forms the bottom layer of HElib, a homomorphic encryption library.

3. 1997

   A discrete logarithm bound

   His paper Lower bounds for discrete logarithms and related problems appears at Eurocrypt in 1997. While at IBM Zurich, he proves a lower bound on the complexity of solving the discrete logarithm problem in the generic group model.

4. 1998

   The Cramer–Shoup cryptosystem

   With Ronald Cramer, he presents a practical public-key cryptosystem at Crypto in 1998 that is provably secure against adaptive chosen-ciphertext attack. The scheme is the first efficient one proven secure against adaptive chosen-ciphertext attack under standard cryptographic assumptions.

5. 2016

   An IACR fellowship

   The International Association for Cryptologic Research names him a fellow in 2016 for fundamental contributions to public-key cryptography and cryptographic security proofs, and for educational leadership.

6. 2022

   A distributed ECDSA service

   With Jens Groth, he presents a distributed ECDSA signing service in 2022. The service is being implemented and integrated into the Internet Computer, enabling smart contracts to hold and spend Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

7. January 2023

   A course with Dan Boneh

   Version 0.6 of A Graduate Course in Applied Cryptography, written with Dan Boneh, is posted in January 2023.

8. As of October 2026

   Researcher at Category Labs

   In 2026 he publishes a practical non-interactive threshold decryption scheme from Category Labs. He is a researcher there and a computer scientist working on computational number theory and algebra, cryptography, and secure distributed systems, and he is professor emeritus at New York University after teaching there for over 20 years. Prior positions include Offchain Labs, the DFINITY Foundation, and IBM Research, and he co-develops HElib for computation on encrypted data using fully homomorphic encryption.