World-leaders in Cryptography: Aggelos Kiayias
ASecuritySite Podcast
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. H works in areas of blockchain technology...
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World-leaders in Cryptography: Anna Lysyanskaya
ASecuritySite Podcast
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...
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Apple Steps Back Their Security
ASecuritySite Podcast
The fallback for law enforcement agencies has always been the place where files are stored, and all the best encryption within end-to-end communications will not stop unencrypted files at rest from being examined. But when the user encrypts data into the Cloud and where they hold their own keys, that’s when the nightmare begins for them. The rise of cybersecurity on the Internet Let’s pinpoint the start of cybersecurity on the Internet to the 1970s. This saw the rise of the Lucifer cipher and saw banks properly protect their communications. This led to the 56-bit DES encryption method, and...
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Samsung S25 Goes PQC
ASecuritySite Podcast
YouTube: Yesterday, I gave two short presentations on PQC (Post Quantum Cryptography), and next week, I’m in London to give a more focused talk on the subject. And so, it’s great to see that Samsung is driving forward the adoption of PQC methods in their new S25 smartphone. There are two companies that have a core focus on creating trusted hardware for consumers: Apple and Samsung. Apple has always had a core focus on making sure they use the best cryptography to not only secure their devices but also to make them privacy-aware. Samsung, too, has strived for improved security but, at...
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Leaders in Digital Trust/Blockchain: Aysegul Sensoy
ASecuritySite Podcast
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 getting an executive MBA. She entered the tech sector after working in national and multinational companies as a marketing director, country manager, and...
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World-leaders in Cryptography: Amit Sahai
ASecuritySite Podcast
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...
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World-leaders in Cryptography: Bart Preneel
ASecuritySite Podcast
Bart is a Professor in the Electrical Engineering department at KU Leuven in Belgium. He co-invented the Miyaguchi (Meya-Goochy)–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 encryption of data at rest ion Google cloud. Bart was the President of the International Association for Cryptologic Research...
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World-leaders in Cryptography: Ivan Damgard
ASecuritySite Podcast
Ivan Damgard 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...
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World-leaders in Cryptography: Chris Peikert
ASecuritySite Podcast
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...
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World-leaders in Cryptography: Clifford Cocks
ASecuritySite Podcast
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...
info_outlineDaniel 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].
It is not just in symmetric key encryption that he has contributed to, he has 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 [paper]. And 2005, it was Daniel again who introduced a new type of attack [here].
Daniel run his Web site from https://cr.yp.to