Moni Naor is the recipient of the 2026 Donald E. Knuth Prize. The Knuth prize honors sustained and profound contributions to the foundations of computer science, and it is difficult to imagine a career that embodies this ideal more fully. For more than three decades, Moni has repeatedly recognized important questions before the rest of the field understood their significance, formulated the right conceptual framework, and has given solutions that are technically deep, remarkably elegant, and enduring. His work ranges across cryptography, pseudorandomness, algorithms, databases, and distributed computing. What unifies it is exceptional intellectual taste and a rare gift for turning a concrete and seemingly simple question into an entirely new theory.
Moni was one of the founders of modern cryptography in the presence of active adversaries. With Moti Yung, he pioneered the construction of public-key encryption provably secure against chosen-ciphertext attacks; with Danny Dolev and Cynthia Dwork, he introduced the fundamental notion of non-malleable cryptography. With Amos Fiat, Moni introduced the fundamental notion of broadcast encryption and gave the first constructions, founding an area that has since become central to secure content distribution and revocation. With Benny Chor and Amos Fiat, he then introduced traitor tracing and gave the first constructions, showing how one can identify a member of a colluding group whose keys were used to construct a pirate decoder. Together, these works established the foundations for controlling access to broadcast content while also deterring and tracing its illicit redistribution. Moni also invented visual cryptography with Adi Shamir.
His ideas also anticipated technologies that would become central much later: his work with Cynthia Dwork on requiring computational effort to obtain access laid an early foundation for proof-of-work, while his proposal for "verification of a human in the loop" anticipated CAPTCHA. Each of these contributions opened a major research direction; several became part of the conceptual infrastructure of the digital world.
His beautifully simple commitment protocol from pseudorandomness became a standard building block of the field, and, with Omer Reingold, he developed one of the landmark constructions of efficient pseudorandom functions.
Yet it would be misleading to describe Moni only as a cryptographer. With Joseph Naor, he introduced small-bias probability spaces, now a fundamental tool in pseudorandomness and derandomization. With Ronald Fagin and Amnon Lotem, he developed instance-optimal aggregation algorithms, work recognized with the Gödel Prize. And with Larry Stockmeyer, he asked the deceptively simple question, “What Can Be Computed Locally?” Their work introduced locally checkable labeling problems and laid the foundations for the modern study of locality in distributed graph algorithms. More than thirty years later, it remains at the center of an extraordinarily active research program and was recognized with the 2025 Dijkstra Prize. Very few researchers have produced foundational work of such depth in so many different areas of theoretical computer science.
There is a distinctive Moni Naor style running through all of this work. The question is often simple enough to explain over coffee: Can an image be decrypted merely by looking at it? Can a broadcast reach everyone except a revoked set? Can we tell whether a user is human? What can a processor learn from only its local neighborhood? But beneath the simple question, Moni discovers a new definition, a new model, or a new way of thinking that reshapes the subject. He has the rare ability to make profound ideas seem natural, although usually only after he has invented them. The Knuth Prize honors a lifetime of changing the foundations of our field. Moni Naor has done precisely that, with extraordinary breadth, originality, elegance, and vision.
Prize Committee:
Noga Alon (Princeton)
Edith Cohen (Chair, Google/Tel Aviv U.)
Yael Tauman Kalai (MIT)
Sampath Kannan (Univ. Penn.)
Valerie King (U. of Victoria)
Salil Vadhan (Harvard U.)