This year, the prestigious Levchin Prize for Real-World Cryptography was awarded to the pioneers of Certificate Transparency (CT): Al Cutter, Emilia Käsper, Adam Langley, and Ben Laurie. This recognition highlights the critical role CT plays in enhancing trust through transparency.

The Significance of the Levchin Prize

The Levchin Prize for Real-World Cryptography, named after Max Levchin, is awarded annually to individuals and projects that have made substantial contributions to practical cryptography. The prize recognizes achievements that have had a profound impact on the security of the digital world. Past winners include the OpenSSL Team, Ralph Merkle and Let's Encrypt.

Awarding the Levchin Prize to Certificate Transparency acknowledges its transformative effect on internet security. By ensuring that all certificates are publicly visible and verifiable, CT has drastically reduced the risk of certificate-related attacks, making the web a safer place for users and businesses alike.

“We Wanted To Give Up”

The award was announced at the Real World Crypto 2024, chaired by Dan Boneh. Emilia Käsper, Adam Langley, and Ben Laurie were present at the ceremony to receive the award.

In her acceptance speech, Emilia Käsper looked back at the CT journey starting with the launch of the first CT log, Pilot, in 2013. Emilia revealed that less than a year in, the team could not get the design to work with the real life constraints and were on the verge of giving up. Despite the challenges the team did not give up, so how did they push through? By believing there had to be a way.

The Next Challenges

Ben Laurie followed up by sharing the next things we should all be believing in and focussing on. He says “The bad news is that the real work of real-world crypto is not crypto, it’s actually user-experience, ecosystem change and systems engineering.”

Ben also highlighted two really huge problems to address in Public Key Infrastructure: Time and Identity. You can watch the whole award ceremony here:

The Power of Community

Ben also acknowledged in his speech that CT took dozens, if not hundreds, maybe even thousands of people to get it deployed and thanked all of them too. Likewise, Al Cutter who was the first engineer on CT and still head of the engineering team that supports CT at Google said: “This recognition also reflects onto everyone who played a part in making CT a reality.”

Congratulations to the entire community on this well-deserved achievement! 👏👏👏