ASecuritySite Podcast

Yael is the Ellen Shallow Richards Professor at MIT. She was previously a Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research. At the Weizmann Institute of Science, Yael worked with Adi Shamir and completed her PhD advised by Shafi Goldwasser at MIT in 2006. She was elected as a Fellow of the IACR in 2022 for foundational contributions in delegated computation and leakage-resilient cryptography, and service to the cryptographic community. She received the ACM Prize in Computing in 2022 for breakthroughs in verifiable delegation of computation and fundamental contributions to cryptography. Yael was a co-inventor of ring signatures, and has also shown the insecurity within the Fiat-Shamir heuristic. Along with Ron Rivest, and Adi Shamir, she published the classic paper of "How to leak a secret".  

Claude is a professor at the École de Technologie Supérieure and obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT in 1990, working in the field of cryptography with Silvio Micali as his Ph.D. advisor and with Gilles Brassard as his MSc advisor. Claude  was a member of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research program on Quantum Information Processing from 2002 to 2012 and is best known for his fundamental work in zero-knowledge proof, multi-party computing, quantum cryptography, and quantum teleportation.  In 1993, along with Charles H. Bennett, Gilles Brassard, and others, Claude invented quantum teleportation. His 1988 STOC paper with David Chaum and Ivan Damgård on secure multi-party computation received the ACM STOC 30-year Test of Time Award in 2021. In 2013, he was elected as a Fellow of the IACR.

Yevgeniy is a Fellow of the IACR (International Association for Cryptologic Research), and a Professor of Computer Science at New York University. He has worked in a variety of areas, including secure messaging and end-to-end security, random number generation, LLM watermarking, cryptography with biometrics and other noisy data, hash function and block cipher design, protocol composition and information-theoretic cryptography. Some of his work on Random Number Generation, Hash Functions and Secure Messaging has had real-world impact (e.g., for Zoom, Microsoft, Apple and Signal, among others). In addition to being an IACR Fellow, Yevgeniy was the recipient of 2021 and 2019 IACR Test-of-Time Awards for his work on Fuzzy Extractors and Verifiable Random Functions. He has also won the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, Faculty Awards from AWS, Facebook, Google, IBM, Algorand, Protocol Labs, JP Morgan, Stellar Foundation and VMware, and the Best Paper Award at the 2005 Public Key Cryptography Conference.  YouTube version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MvfSuyWTqA 

David is a cryptographer and a professor at the École normale supérieure. He was previously a professor at Panthéon-Assas University. David is well known for his work in public-key cryptography, especially around the cryptanalysis of digital signature schemes. He co-designed the Naccache-Stern cryptosystem and the  Naccache-Stern knapsack cryptosystem. David is also a visiting professor and researcher at the Information Security Group of Royal Holloway, University of London, and in 2020, was elected as a Fellow of the IACR.

 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 in 2016 for his "contributions to applied cryptography, authentication and computer security.

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.  

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 Fred Piper. Kenny has been awarded a number of awards for his research work, including the Applied Networking Research Prize from the IRTF in 2013 and the Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies, for work with Mihir Bellare and Phil Rogaway on the Security of symmetric encryption against mass surveillance, a paper published at CRYPTO 2014.

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 Research Award, the IBM Faculty Award, and the IEEE CISTC Technical Recognition Award for his research on cloud security. Giuseppe was a researcher at IBM Zurich Research lab (Switzerland) and a scientist at the Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California (USA), and worked briefly as a visiting professor at Microsoft in Redmond (USA). He was the Farber Endowed Chair in Computer Science and Department Chair at Stevens Institute of Technology. He previously worked with Sapienza University of Rome (Italy) and was an Associate Professor at Johns Hopkins University (USA). Giuseppe is also one of the JHU Information Security Institute's founders. 

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 enhanced the theory behind singular-value decomposition by extending it to multilinear dimensions, which has addressed complex data-mining challenges. Joos is also an IEEE Life Fellow and served as the President of the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium KVAB. He also co-wrote the book defining "The Invisible Power of Mathematics".

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 the "Simulation-sound NIZK proofs for a practical language and constant size group signature".  Then, in 2023, he won the IACR Test of Time Award with Amit Sahai for the 2018 paper on "Efficient Non-Interactive Proof Systems for Bilinear Groups".   The YouTube version is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooOYmDzoQj Medium article: https://billatnapier.medium.com/groth16-and-proving-your-know-the-answer-to-x%C2%B2-2x-15-029f6db184d0