He is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is also a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences. He is a recipient of the ACM Turing Award.
Professor Rivest is an inventor of the RSA public-key cryptosystem, and a founder of RSA Data Security. He has extensive experience in cryptographic design and cryptanalysis, and has published numerous papers in these areas. He has served a Director of the International Association for Cryptologic Research, the organizing body for the Eurocrypt and Crypto conferences. He was worked extensively in the areas of algorithms, machine learning, election security, and digital contact-tracing.