#  Madhu Sudan wins the FOCS 30-year Test of Time Award! 

 





December 23, 2025

 

 

Congratulations to Madhu Sudan for receiving the [FOCS 30-year Test of Time Award](https://focs.computer.org/2025/test-of-time-awards/) for the paper: "Private Information Retrieval" (Authors: Benny Chor, Oded Goldreich, Eyal Kushilevitz, Madhu Sudan)!

This remarkable paper introduced a fundamental primitive in the field of cryptography: how to query a data base fully preserving the privacy of the query. The work introduced the notion of private information retrieval (PIR), gave the first protocols that allow users to retrieve items from distributed databases without revealing which item — thereby founding a new subfield at the intersection of cryptography, information theory, and complexity theory. Its definitions and constructions have shaped decades of research, enabled practical variants, and remain a cornerstone for privacy-preserving data access.



 

 

 



 

 

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