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 Research. Ivan has also co-founded two cryptography companies: Cryptomathic and Partisia.

Web: here.

Video: here.

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.

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.

Read more: https://medium.com/asecuritysite-when-bob-met-alice/so-who-invented-public-key-encryption-213ceef7759

Bill Buchanan Chats With Debbie Reynolds (The Data Diva). Debbie's podcast is here:

https://www.debbiereynoldsconsulting.com/podcast

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.

Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=4H1u8swAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao

Matthew is a cryptographer and academic at Johns Hopkins University and has designed and analyzed cryptographic systems used in wireless networks, payment systems and digital content protection platforms. A key focus of his work is in the promotion of user privacy. He has an extensive following on X/Twitter (140K followers) and his blog covers important areas of cryptography:

https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/author/matthewdgreen/

His research has been cited over 15,000 times and includes work on Zerocash, Zerocoin and Identity Based Encryption (IBE), and more recently on privacy-aware signatures:

https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?hl=en&user=X0XWAGkAAAAJ

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".

Video recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5GWFAewQ80

This seminar series runs for students on the Network Security and Cryptography module, but invites guests to participate. Bruce has created a wide range of cryptographic methods including Skein (hash function), Helix (stream cipher), Fortuna (random number generator), and Blowfish/Twofish/Threefish (block ciphers).

Bruce has published 14 books, including best-sellers such as Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World. He has also published hundreds of articles, essays, and academic papers. Currently, Bruce is a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.