World-leaders in Cryptography: Paul van Oorschot
ASecuritySite Podcast
Paul is a cryptographer and computer security researcher, and is currently a professor of computer science at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario. He previously held a Canada Research Chair in authentication and computer security and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (FRSC). Along with Alfred Menezes and Scott Vanstone, Paul was a co-author of the Handbook of Applied Cryptography, and the author of Computer Security and the Internet. In 2000, he was awarded The J.W. Graham Medal in Computing Innovation, and a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery...
info_outline
World-leaders in Cryptography: Craig Costello
ASecuritySite Podcast
Craig is a Professor of Computer Science at Queensland University of Technology (QUT), who has a special focus on post-quantum cryptography and Zero Knowledge Proofs. He was previously a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research at Redmond. Craig did his PhD at QUT from 2008 to 2012, and received a Fulbright Scholarship with UC Irvine from 2010 and 2011. In 2015, Craig published details of the FourQ elliptic curve, and which is one of the fastest curves around.
info_outline
World-leaders in Cryptography: Kenny Paterson
ASecuritySite Podcast
Kenny is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at ETH Zurich, where he leads the Applied Cryptography Group. He was previously a professor in the Information Security Group at Royal Holloway, University of London. He served as co-chair of the IRTF's research group on Cryptography, CFRG, from 2014 to 2019 and as the Editor-in-Chief for the Journal of Cryptography 2017 to 2020. He was elected as an IACR Fellow in 2017 and was the IACR Distinguished Lecturer in 2025. He obtained his PhD from Royal Holloway in 1993, and his Doctoral Supervisor was...
info_outline
World-leaders in Cryptography: Giuseppe Ateniese
ASecuritySite Podcast
Giuseppe is a Professor, Eminent Scholar in the Cybersecurity and CCI Faculty Fellow in the Department of Computer Science and the Department of Cyber Security Engineering at George Mason University. He has advanced many areas of research, including proxy re-encryption, anonymous communication, two-party computation, secure storage, and provable data possession. His current work includes privacy-preserving machine learning and decentralised secure computing based on blockchain technology. He received the NSF CAREER Award for his research on privacy and security, and the Google Faculty...
info_outline
World-leaders in Cryptography: Joos Vandewalle
ASecuritySite Podcast
Joos is a Professor Emeritus with the Department of Electrical Engineering at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium. He is one of the most impactful researchers in Computer Science in the World, including in areas of cryptography, secure data communications, data mining and complex systems. His work has led to many areas of impact, including supervising the creators of the Advanced Encryption Standard. He has also worked to simplify the computational complexity of support vector machines, and which involved using a least-squares approach for learning-based classifiers. He has also...
info_outline
World-leaders in Cryptography: Jens Groth
ASecuritySite Podcast
Jens is a Chief Scientist at Nexus, and works in many areas of cryptography including in pairing-based cryptography and Zero-knowledge Proofs (ZKPs). He was previously a Professor of Cryptology at University College, London, and as the Director of Research at DFINITY. In 2016, he published a classic paper of “On the size of pairing-based non-interactive arguments”, and which defines a Zero Knowledge Proof based on pairing-based cryptography. This is now known as Groth16, and is used in many applications, including with Zcash and Tornado Cash. In 2021, he won an IACR Test of Time award for...
info_outline
World-leaders in Cryptography: Daniele Micciancio
ASecuritySite Podcast
Daniele is a professor in the Computer Science and Engineering department at the University of California, San Diego and, in 2019, he was elected as a Fellow of the IACR. His main focus is on the foundations of lattice-based cryptography and its advanced applications, including fully homomorphic encryption. Overall, he has published many classic papers that relate to lattice methods, including working with Chris Peikert on "Trapdoors for lattices", and with Oded Regev on the "Worst-case to average-case reductions based on Gaussian methods". Daniele has also contributed greatly to...
info_outline
World-leaders in Cryptography: Gene Tsudik
ASecuritySite Podcast
Gene is a Distinguished and ICS Alumni Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) where he has been since 2000. His research covers areas of security, privacy, and cryptography. From 1991 to 1996, he was a researcher at the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory and then at the Information Science Institute until 2000. He is a Fulbright scholar and a Fellow of the ACM, IEEE, AAAS, and IFIP. From 2009 to 2015, he was the editor-in-chief of the ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security (TOPS). Over the years, Gene has received a number of awards,...
info_outline
World-leaders in Technology: Vint Cerf
ASecuritySite Podcast
Vint is seen as one of the founding fathers of the Internet, and along with Robert Kahn, was award the ACM AM Turing Prize - the Nobel Prize of Computer Science - in 2004. Vint contributed to many areas in the creation of the Internet, including writing many RFCs (Requests For Comment) drafts, and in 1974 published the classic paper of "A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication" in the IEEE Transactions on Communications. This paper basically defined the IP and TCP protocols that would eventually be used to build the Internet. Along with the A.M. Turing Award, he...
info_outline
Panel Discussion: The Quantum clock countdown to Y2Q
ASecuritySite Podcast
Panel Discussion: The Quantum clock countdown to Y2Q , CEO Scottish Centre of Excellence in Digital Trust and DLT , Founder and CEO ACubed.IT , Founder CyberSeQ J , Senior Researcher Cybernetica Estonia
info_outlinePlease excuse the poor quality of my microphone, as the wrong microphone was selected.
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.
LaTeX
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.
Clocks
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.
Byzantine Generals Problem
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.
The Lamport Signature
Sometime soon, we perhaps need to wean ourselves of our existing public key methods and look to techniques that are more challenging for quantum computers. With the implementation of Shor’s algorithm [here] on quantum computers, we will see our RSA and Elliptic Curve methods being replaced by methods which are quantum robust. One method is the Lamport signature method and which was created by Leslie B. Lamport in 1979.