Prof. Eli Biham received his BSc in Mathematics and Computer Science at the Tel Aviv University (cum laude), 1982, and his PhD from the Weizmann Institute (1991). His PhD thesis developed Differential Cryptanalysis, the first cryptanalysis method that could break the Data Encryption Standard (DES), and the first general cryptanalysis method that was applicable to a large family of block ciphers. Since 1991 he has been a faculty member at the Technion's faculty of Computer Science. He (together with his students and colleagues) developed various methods for analysis of various kinds of ciphers. The most known of them are DES, and the cipher of the GSM cellular phone system (A5) - which proved that it is easy to listen in to any GSM (voice or data) conversation, and even to fake such calls as if originated from somebody else's phone. He also developed new ciphers, the most known of them is Serpent, which was a leading candidate to become the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) - the successor of DES. Eli Biham is the founding head of the Technion Hiroshi Fujiwara cyber security research center. He served in dozens of program committees, as the program and general chair of the FSE 1997 workshop, and as program chair of EUROCRYPT 2003 and SAC 2006. He was also an editor of the Journal of Cryptology and a director of the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR). Between 2008 and 2013 he served as the dean of the faculty of computer science. Since 2012 he has been an IACR fellow. He received the RSA award (2012) and holds the position of IACR distinguished lecturer (2013).
