Ronald Linn Rivest is a cryptographer and an Institute Professor at MIT. He is a member of MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a member of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. His work has spanned the fields of algorithms and combinatorics, cryptography, machine learning, and election integrity.
Rivest is one of the inventors of the RSA algorithm. He is the inventor of the symmetric key encryption algorithms RC2, RC4, RC5, and co-inventor of RC6. The "RC" stands for "Rivest Cipher", or alternatively, "Ron's Code". He also authored the MD2, MD4, MD5 and MD6 cryptographic hash functions.