Some recent activities

World-leaders in Cryptography

We have been running a World-leaders in Cryptography series of chats. These include the following

Jonathan Katz

Jonathan was a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland. He is now a Senior Staff Research Scientist at Google, with a core focus on cryptography and cybersecurity. Jonathan received his BS degree in mathematics and chemistry from MIT in 1996, and, in 2002, completed a PhD in computer science from Columbia University.  He wrote a classic textbook on cryptography, and which is in its 3rd edition. Jonathon also has an online course on Coursera and has given tutorials of various forms on different topics to multiple kinds of audiences.

Moti Yung

Moti is a Security and Privacy Research Scientist with Google and an Adjunct Research Faculty member at the Computer Science Dep of Columbia University. He received his PhD from Columbia University in 1988. In 2010 he gave the IACR Distinguished Lecture and has also been the recipient of the 2014 ACM’s SIGSAC Outstanding Innovation award, the 2014 ESORICS (European Symposium on Research in Computer Security) Outstanding Research award, an IBM Outstanding Innovation award, a Google OC award, and a Google founders’ award. Moti has also received three test of time awards, including in 2024 for his 1998 paper On the Security of ElGamal Based Encryption, and in 2020 for his 1996 paper Cryptovirology: extortion-based security threats and countermeasures. In 2021, Moti received the Women of the ENIAC Computer Pioneer Award. Overall, his main research focus areas in Security, Privacy, and Cryptography.

Aggelos Kiayias

Aggelos Kiayias is a professor at the University of Edinburgh and the chief science officer at Input Output Global (formerly IOHK). He received his PhD in 2002 from City University of New York. He is chair in cyber security and privacy, and director of the Blockchain Technology Laboratory at the University of Edinburgh. In 2021, Aggelos was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE), and was recently awarded the BCS Lovelace Medal 2024 for his transformative contributions to the theory and practice of cyber security and cryptography. He works in areas of blockchain technology and distributed systems, cryptography, e-voting and secure multiparty protocols, as well as privacy-enhanced identity management.

Anna Lysyanskaya

Anna is a Professor of Computer Science at Brown University. Her research spans many areas of advanced cryptography including with digital signatures, group signatures, blind signatures, e-cash and anonymous digital credentials. She was originally from Ukraine, and undertook her masters degree at MIT in 1999, and then went onto a PhD in 2002 in the areas of Signature Schemes and Applications to Cryptographic Protocol Design. She joined Brown University in 2002, and was made a full professor in 2013. She is a member of the board of directors at the IACR, along with serving on Scientific Advisory Board for the Board of Directors of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC). In 2024, she was awarded the Levchin Prize for a contribution entitled “For the Development of Anonymous Credentials”.

Amit Sahai

Amit is a professor of computer science at UCLA and is the director of the Center for Encrypted Functionalities. Amit has been cited in his research work over 63,000 times and has an h-index of 91. In 2000, he graduated with a PhD from MIT and then moved to Princeton. In 2004, he then moved to UCLA. Over the years, he has made so many great advancements, including being the co-inventor of many areas of cryptography, including indistinguishability obfuscation schemes, functional encryption, attribute-based encryption, Zero-Knowledge Proofs and Multiparty Computation. In 2018, he was elected as an ACM Fellow for his work for the “contributions to cryptography and to the development of indistinguishability obfuscation”, and elected as a Fellow of the International Association for Cryptologic Research for “fundamental contributions, including to secure computation, zero knowledge, and functional encryption, and for service to the IACR”. In 2023, Amit received the Test of Time Award from the International Association for Cryptologic Research for his 2008 paper “Efficient Non-interactive Proof Systems for Bilinear Groups”. Then, in 2022, he received the Michael and Sheila Held Prize from the National Academy of Sciences and which credits outstanding, innovative, creative, and influential research in the areas of combinatorial and discrete optimisation. And, in teaching, in 2016, he won the UCLA Samueli’s Lockheed Martin Excellence in Teaching Award.

Bart Preneel

Bart is a Professor in the Electrical Engineering department at KU Leuven in Belgium. He co-invented the Miyaguchi–Preneel scheme and which converts a block cipher into a hash function. Bart is also one of the co-inventors of the RIPEMD-160 hashing method, and which is used in Bitcoin addresses. He also co-designed the stream ciphers MUGI and Trivium, the MAC Algorithms Chaskey and MDxMAC and the authenticated encryption algorithm AEGIS that is used to encrypt data at rest on the Google Cloud. Bart was the President of the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR) from 2008 to 2013 and one of his hobbies is conducting the University of Leuven Bigband and playing saxophone in a Dixieland band. Bart consults for industry and government on cybersecurity and privacy. He founded the mobile authentication startup nextAuth and holds roles in Approach Belgium, Tioga Capital Partners, and Nym Technologies. During the pandemic, he co-designed the DP-3T scheme for privacy-friendly contact tracing and managed the Belgian Coronalert app. Actively engaged in cybersecurity policy, he contributes to ENISA as an Advisory Group member for the EU.

Chris Peikert – a World-leader in Lattice

Chris is a Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering department at the University of Michigan. He completed his PhD in 2006 at the MIT Computer Science and AI Laboratory under the mentorship of Silvio Micali.  He received a Test of Time award at Crypto 2008 for a paper entitled “A Framework for Efficient and Composable Oblivious Transfer” and also a TCC Test of Time award for his paper on “Efficient Collision-Resistant Hashing from Worst-Case Assumptions on Cyclic Lattices,” in 2006.  In 2024, Chris was elected as a Fellow of the International Association for Cryptologic Research and is seen as one of the world leaders in lattice-based methods.

Ivan Damgård – co-creator of MD hashing methods

Ivan Damgård is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at Aarhus University in Denmark. He is the co-inventor of the Merkle-Damgard construction, and which was used in MD5, SHA-1 and SHA-2. In 2020, he received the Test of Time Award for a paper entitled “A Generalisation, a Simplification and Some Applications of Paillier’s Probabilistic Public-Key System”, and in 2021 he received an ACM award for the Test of Time for a paper entitled “Multiparty unconditionally secure protocols. In 2010, he was elected as a Fellow of the International Association for Cryptologic Research. Ivan has also co-founded two cryptography companies: Cryptomathic and Partisia.

Clifford Cox – co-creator of Public Key Encryption

Clifford Cocks is a British mathematician and cryptographer. While working at GCHQ, he invented public key encryption, and which predates the work of the RSA and Diffie-Hellman methods. He studied mathematics as an undergraduate at Kings College, Cambridge, and then joined the Communications-Electronics Security Group (CESG) at GCHQ in 1973. After his discovery of a usable public key encryption method, he went on to create one of the first Identity-Based Encryption methods and which is based on quadratic residues rather than bilinear pairings. In 2008, he was made a Companion of the Order of the Bath (CB). Then, in 2010, he and James Ellis and Malcolm Williamson were honoured by the IEEE for their part in the development of public key encryption. In 2015, he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society, and, in the same year, he received an honorary PhD from the University of Birmingham. Then, in 2021, Clifford was inducted into the Cryptologic Hall of Honour.

Vadim Lyubashevsky – a King of Lattice

Vadim Lyubashevsky is a cryptographer at IBM Research Europe in Zurich. He received his PhD from the University of California, San Diego in 2008. His core research focus is around lattice-based methods, and especially in areas of practical lattice encryption, digital signatures and privacy-preserving primitives. Along with Chris Peiker and Oded Regev (the inventor of LWE), he published a classic paper entitled “On ideal lattices and learning with errors over rings”, which has been used as a foundation for lattice methods within post-quantum cryptography. Vadim has worked in many areas of cryptography, including Zero Knowledge Proofs, Blind Signatures and Multiparty Computation.

Alfred Menezes – co-inventor of ECDSA

Alfred Menezes is a Professor at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. In 2001, he won the Hall Medal from the Institute of Combinatorics and its Applications. Alfred is the lead author of the Handbook of Applied Cryptography, and which has been cited over 25,000 times. He has published many high-impact papers, especially in areas of public key encryption and elliptic curve cryptography, and was the co-inventor of the ECDSA signature method. His website for online courses is https://cryptography101.ca. The “Cryptography101: Building Blocks” and “Cryptography 101: Deployments” courses are lectures from the undergraduate “Applied Cryptography” that he has taught at Waterloo since 2000. The former includes a five-lecture introduction to elliptic curve cryptography. He also has a course on “Kyber and Dilithium”, and soon an intro to “Lattice-based cryptography”.

Yuriy Polyakov – co-founder of OpenFHE

Yuriy Polyakov is the Vice President of Cryptography and a Principal Scientist at Duality Technologies. His research interests include applied lattice-based cryptography, fully homomorphic encryption, and privacy-preserving machine learning. He is also a co-founder of the open-source PALISADE Homomorphic Encryption Software Library, and a co-founder and project lead for OpenFHE.

Kurt Rohloff – co-founder of OpenFHE

Kurt Rohloff is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) and a co-founder and CTO of Duality Technologies. He is also a co-founder of the open-source PALISADE Homomorphic Encryption Software Library, and a co-founder of the OpenFHE library.

Thomas Prest – co-author of the FALCON signature

Thomas Preset is a cryptography researcher at PQShield and previously worked with Thales. He completed his PhD at the École Normale Supérieure and focuses on post-quantum cryptography and discrete algorithms. Thomas was one of the co-authors of the FALCON digital signature method and has published widely in related areas of PQC.

Brent Waters – co-creator of Attribute Based Encryption

Brent Waters is a Professor at the University of Texas at Austin and the Director of the Cryptography Lab at NTT Research. He graduated from the UCL in 2000, then completed a PhD at Princeton University in 2004. After this, we moved on to Stanford as a postdoc. Overall, Brent was the first to propose Attribute-based Encryption (ABE) and also the first to outline functional encryption. He was also awarded the Sloan Research Fellowship in 2010, and, in 2015, he was awarded the Grace Murray Hopper Award for his work on ABE and functional encryption. Brent’s research has been cited over 68,700 times for his research work, and has provided a core foundation for cybersecurity to move towards methods that provide fine-grained data access.

Leslie Lamport

In research, we are all just building on the shoulders of true giants, and there are few larger giants than Leslie Lamport — the creator of LaTeX. For me, every time I open up a LaTeX document, I think of the work he did on creating LaTeX, and which makes my research work so much more productive. If I was still stuck with Microsoft Office for research, I would spend half of my time in that horrible equation editor, or in trying to integrate the references into the required format, or in formatting Header 1 and Header 2 to have a six-point spacing underneath. So, for me, the contest between LaTeX and Microsoft Word is a knock-out in the first round. And one of the great things about Leslie is that his work is strongly academic — and which provides foundations for others to build on. For this, he did a great deal on the ordering of task synchronisation, in state theory, cryptography signatures, and fault tolerance. I really can say enough about how much LaTeX — created in 1984 — helps my work. I am writing a few books just now, and it allows me to lay out the books in the way that I want to deliver the content. There’s no need for a further mark-up, as I work on the output that the reader will see. But the true genius of LaTeX is the way that teams can work on a paper, and where there can be async to GitHub and where version control is then embedded. Many in the research community think that the quality measure of a paper is the impact factor of the journal that it is submitted to, or in the amount of maths that it contains. But, in the end, it is the impact of the paper and how it changes thinking. For Leslie, in 1978, his paper on clocks changed our scientific world and is one of the most cited papers in computer science. In 1981, Leslie B Lamport defined the Byzantine Generals Problem. And in a research world where you can have 100s of references in a paper, Leslie only used four (and which would probably not be accepted these days for having so few references). Within this paper, the generals of a Byzantine army have to agree to their battle plan, in the face of adversaries passing in order information. In the end, we aim to create a way of passing messages where if at least two out of three of the generals are honest, we will end up with the correct battle plan.

Dan J Bernstein

Daniel J Bernstein (djb) was born in 1971. He is a USA/German citizen and a Personal Professor at Eindhoven University of Technology and a Research Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. At the tender age of 24 — in 1995 — he, along with the Electronic Frontier Foundation — brought a case against the US Government related to the protection of free speech (Bernstein v. United States: here). It resulted in a ruling that software should be included in the First Amendment. A core contribution is that it has reduced government regulations around cryptography. It was a sign of the greatness that was to come from the amazing mind of Daniel. His viewpoint on reducing the strength of cryptography at the time defined: “There are, fortunately, not many terrorists in the world. But there are many criminals exploiting Internet vulnerabilities for economic gain. They infiltrate computers and steal whatever secrets they can find, from individual credit-card numbers to corporate business plans. There are also quite a few vandals causing trouble just for fun.” Since then few others have done so much for the cause of privacy, including creating the Sala20 [link] stream cipher in 2005, and then with ChaCha20 [link] and Poly1305 in 2008. Many connections in TLS now use ChaCha20, rather than AES, as it is faster — over three times after than AES — and has a lower computing requirement. His love of using dance names also comes to the fore with Rumba [here]. He has not only contributed to symmetric key encryption but also made significant contributions to public key encryption. In 2005, he defined the Curve 25519 elliptic curve, and which is now a fairly standard way of defining elliptic curves. For signatures, he then defined Ed25519, and the resultant version of a new EdDSA signature (and which is now included in OpenSSH). The Tor protocol, for example, uses Curve 25519 for its key exchange for each of the nodes involved in a secure route. He defined the SPHINCS+ method for PQC digital signatures. This is one of the NIST approved methods for quantum robust signatures. In 2015, Daniel defined the methods that the NSA may have used to compromise the NIST defined elliptic curves.

Innovators in Cryptography and Blockchain

Maciej Zurawski

Maciej is a technology entrepreneur and blockchain specialist with over 25 years of experience in commercial software development, R&D and business leadership. He is currently the CEO at Redeem Technologies, and serves as the Executive Director of Blockchain Scotland – the principal industry association advancing commercial blockchain adoption across Scotland. His expertise spans enterprise software architecture, artificial intelligence and decentralised systems, complemented by a doctorate in AI. Maciej regularly advises government bodies and financial institutions on blockchain implementation and digital transformation strategy.

Jamie Gilchrist

Jamie is the CTO at Umazi, the Head of Research at DataFair.ai and co-founder and CEO of Tunestamp.

Ayşegül Şensoy

Aysegul Sensoy has over 20 years of management experience with blockchain, emerging technologies, fintech, business development, marketing and sales. She is currently the chair of the Istanbul Blockchain Women Association and CIS Regional Manager of Fuze Finance. She received her bachelor’s degree in economics from Istanbul University and her master’s degree in marketing communications management from Galatasaray University, as well as an executive MBA. She entered the tech sector after working in national and multinational companies as a marketing director, country manager, and many other roles. Aysegul is CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States) regional manager of Fuze Finance, an Abu Dhabi-based licensed fintech providing embedded digital asset capabilities for financial institutions. She was the Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer at XYZ Teknoloji, a blockchain-focused FinTech company based in Istanbul. Aysegul is a chairwoman and founding member of Istanbul Blockchain Woman, a non-profit association dedicated to empowering women in the blockchain ecosystem. The community’s purpose is to organise social responsibility projects that will provide women with positive discrimination in terms of technology and blockchain. She is also a co-founder of the SOS Chain initiative, partners with needsmap.coop, which is a blockchain infrastructure fund for disasters and rapid humanitarian crises worldwide.

Greg McLardie

Greg McLardie has 30 years of executive experience in the USA, Australia, Japan, China and now the UK with the likes of Procter & Gamble and EY. He co-created Two Hands and has been operating for over 5 years in Australia and China, with Forbes Magazine publishing a three-page feature on its unique blockchain application in the food industry. With strong traction internationally, Two Hands has established a company and transferred global IP to the UK to attract investment to scale its impact into the UK, EU and beyond.