Born and raised in New York City, he attended MIT as both an undergraduate and graduate student,[1] and earned a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science in 1974.
He spent a year as a postdoctoral scholar at INRIA in France.
In 1988, he collaborated with Michael Luby in a widely cited analysis of the Feistel cipher construction (one important result shown there is the construction of a strongly pseudo random permutation generator from a pseudo random function generator).
[2][3] In 2011, he won the RSA Award for Excellence in Mathematics for his various contributions to cryptography.
Rackoff's controversial comments on the 2000 memorial for the victims of the Montreal Massacre were reported in the Canadian media.