Bo-Yin Yang

Bo-Yin Yang
楊柏因
Born	(1969-02-14) February 14, 1969 Princeton, New Jersey, United States
Nationality	Republic of China  United States
Alma mater	National Taiwan University (BA) Massachusetts Institute of Technology (PhD)
Known for	Post-quantum cryptography
Awards	IACR Fellow (2025) NSTC Outstanding Research Award (2024) Academia Sinica Investigator Award (2020)
Scientific career
Fields	Computer science Cryptography Mathematics Computer Security
Institutions	Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica

Bo-Yin Yang (Chinese: 楊柏因; born February 14, 1969) is a Taiwanese-American cryptographer based in Taiwan. He is a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Institute of Information Science,^[1] Academia Sinica, and also teaches as a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at National Taiwan University. His research interests include cryptographic implementation, algebraic cryptanalysis, and post-quantum cryptography.

Bo-Yin Yang was born in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. His father, Wei-Zhe Yang, was a professor in the Department of Mathematics at National Taiwan University, known for his distinctive teaching style and passion for education. This 1983 photo, taken by Taiwan Panorama, shows a young Bo-Yin Yang playing a game with his father, Wei-Zhe Yang. It captures a moment of intergenerational exchange and familial warmth.^[2] Bo-Yin Yang received his education in Taiwan and demonstrated exceptional talent in mathematics and science. In the second year of junior high school (8th grade in Taiwan), he was granted special permission by Minister of Education Chu Hui-sen to skip ninth grade and enter the Affiliated Senior High School of National Taiwan Normal University. He later skipped twelfth grade to enter the Department of Physics at National Taiwan University, graduating in 1987 at the age of 18. At the time, he was the youngest university graduate in Taiwan and the first student officially recognized for skipping three educational levels. His case sparked widespread discussion on gifted education and led to the establishment of the Special Education Act, which provided a more structured framework for supporting gifted students. After graduating from university, Yang pursued graduate studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned a Ph.D. in applied mathematics in 1991.

After receiving his Ph.D., Bo-Yin Yang taught in the Department of Mathematics at Tamkang University from 1992 to 2006. After 2002, he shifted his research focus from combinatorics to cryptography. In 2006, he joined the Institute of Information Science at Academia Sinica as an Associate Research Fellow, was promoted to Research Fellow in 2011, and became a Distinguished Research Fellow in 2024.

Bo-Yin Yang is a noted cryptographic implementer^[3] who worked on Postquantum Cryptography before it became PQC. Bo-Yin Yang's primary research areas are cryptographic implementation^[3] and post-quantum cryptography. He is best known for co-authoring the Ed25519 digital signature scheme in 2011, along with Daniel J. Bernstein and others, which was later standardized in FIPS 186-5. Another notable contribution is the Bernstein–Yang algorithm proposed in 2019 for secure modular inverse computation. He also proved the correctness of the signed variant of Barrett modular multiplication, currently the state-of-the-art for implementing lattice-based cryptography such as Kyber (ML-KEM) and Dilithium (ML-DSA)[2]. In 2022, his group was also the first to formally verify implementations of this kind.^[4]

Source:^[5]

Jointly proposed in 2011, by Daniel J. Bernstein、Niels Duif、Tanja Lange^[6]、Peter Schwabe,^[7] this digital signature scheme was built from Schnorr which had well-understood principles, and was more efficient than ECDSA (really a Schnorr variant designed to avoid Schnorr's patent).

Ed25519 gained traction after the Snowden revelations and became an international standard, eventually being adopted by TLS and Google. Finally NIST made it official and Ed25519 became a standard in FIPS 186-5.^[8] Today Ed25519 protects millions of connections and billions in e-commerce daily. Today's fastest 25519 modular inversion is engineered by Yang

Bo-Yin Yang studied quadratic system-solving early on and he was one of the earliest to use asymptotic analysis with generating functions (Hilbert Series), thereby deducing that sparse solvers^[9] used with XL (Extended Linearization^[10]) will beat more structured Gröbner bases methods asymptotically with randomized quadratic systems. He also proved that smart enumeration works and his lab demonstrated that it beats more structured Gröbner bases methods practically up to fairly big sizes, holding multivariate quadratic (MQ) challenges^[11] crowns for some years. Yang was also one of the most well-known proponents of MQ crypto, a leading member of the Rainbow and later UOV teams.^[12]

The Euclidean algorithm was known since antiquity, but the Greeks naturally had no idea about time-constancy: A fast constant-time version was not known until 2019. Today "safegcd", the modular inversion algorithm by Daniel J. Bernstein and Bo-Yin Yang, is used in Bitcoin Core and other official blockchain software, protecting trillions of dollars' worth in Bitcoins. Similarly, safegcd is used inside the OpenSSH version of NTRU Prime. It has even been used in formally verified form.

Bo-Yin Yang participated in many high assurance crypto software milestones,^[13] supplying a crypto implementer's insight^[14] of the instruction sequences. These include the first (2014) formal verification of a key big integer arithmetic subroutine (25519), the first (2017) semi-automatic verification of big integer arithmetic subroutines, and first (2022) verification work on key postquantum cryptographic components (here, the Number Theoretic Transform). Much of this research was conducted in collaboration with formal verification experts Bow-Yaw wang^[15] and Ming-Hsien Tsai^[16].

Bo-Yin Yang is recognized for his expertise in applying Fast Fourier Transforms (FFTs) to post-quantum cryptography. His team has produced highly optimized low-level implementations of post-quantum cryptographic schemes, several of which remain state-of-the-art and have undergone formal verification. In the work titled "Neon NTT",^[4] Yang demonstrated the correctness of signed Barrett modular multiplication, which has since become the standard technique for Number Theoretic Transforms (NTTs) on high-performance ARM architectures.

Source:^[17]

Bo-Yin Yang has served as the organizer of several major international conferences, including the Conference on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems (CHES 2017^[18]), the International Conference on Quantum Cryptography (QCrypt 2022^[19]), Asiacrypt 2022,^[20] the Theory of Cryptography Conference (TCC 2023^[21]), and the International Conference on Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQCrypto 2025^[22]). His team is also scheduled to host the Real World Crypto Symposium (RWC 2026^[23]) in Taipei.

He is currently a Fellow of the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR) and co-chair of the program committee for Asiacrypt 2025.^[24] His previous roles in major international conferences include serving as program chair of PQCrypto 2011^[25] and co-chair of the program committees for PKC 2016^[26] and CHES 2024^[27].

Yang has also been active in promoting cybersecurity policy in Taiwan, advocating for greater government investment and talent recruitment to address the potential threats quantum computing poses to existing cryptographic systems. He has emphasized that if the public sector can provide suitable cryptographic utilities, it would help reduce the overall societal cost of adopting post-quantum cryptography.^[28]

• IACR Fellow, International Association of Cryptologic Research (2025)^[29]
• NSTC Outstanding Research Award (2024)