Dwork received her B.S.E. fromPrinceton University in 1979, graduating Cum Laude, and receiving the Charles Ira Young Award for Excellence in Independent Research.Dwork received her Ph.D. fromCornell University in 1983[3] for research supervised byJohn Hopcroft.[4][2]
Dwork is known for her research placing privacy-preserving data analysis on a mathematically rigorous foundation, including the invention ofdifferential privacy in the early to mid 2000s, a strong privacy guarantee frequently permitting highly accurate data analysis.[5] The definition of differential privacy relies on the notion of indistinguishability of the outputs irrespective of whether an individual has contributed their data or not. This is typically achieved by adding small amounts of noise either to the input data or to outputs of computations performed on the data.[6] She uses a systems-based approach to studying fairness in algorithms including those used for placing ads.[7] Dwork has also made contributions incryptography anddistributed computing, and is a recipient of theEdsger W. Dijkstra Prize for her early work on the foundations offault-tolerant systems.[8]
Her contributions in cryptography includenon-malleable cryptography withDanny Dolev andMoni Naor in 1991, the firstlattice-based cryptosystem withMiklós Ajtai in 1997, which was also the firstpublic-key cryptosystem for which breaking a random instance is as hard as solving the hardest instance of the underlying mathematical problem ("worst-case/average-case equivalence"). With Naor she also first presented the idea of, and a technique for, combatinge-mail spam by requiring a proof of computational effort, also known asproof-of-work — a key technology underlyinghashcash andbitcoin.
In 2020, she received theIEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal for "foundational work in privacy, cryptography, and distributed computing, and for leadership in developing differential privacy."[18]
She is a co-winner of the 2021 ACM Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award for her and her co-authors' "fundamental contributions to the development of differential privacy".[20]
She is co-winner of the 2022 RSA Award for Excellence in Mathematics for "contributions to the foundation of privacy and to the foundations of cryptography".[21]
In 2022, her 1991STOC paper, with Dolev and Naor, “Non-Malleable Cryptography,”[22] won aSTOC 30-year Test-of Time award.[23]
