My name is Asokan. I am a researcher and teacher, specializing in systems security. I lead the Secure Systems Group which is part of CrySP at the University of Waterloo. At UWaterloo, I hold a Cheriton Chair and serve as the executive director of Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute. Previously (2013-2019), I co-founded and co-led the Secure Systems Group at Aalto University, where I am currently an adjunct professor with the Department of Computer Science. I also served as a professor at the Department of Computer Science, University of Helsinki (2012-2017).

You can find more information about my research in the publications page and the recent talks page.

I am a principal investigator of the Private AI Collaborative Research Institute, funded jointly by Intel Labs and other industry partners. Previously, I served as a principal investigator for ICRI-CARS, and the lead academic principal investigator for ICRI-SC in Finland. I was the founding director of the Helsinki-Aalto Center for Information Security (HAIC) (now renamed to Helsinki-Aalto Institute for Cybersecurity) whose mission was to attract top students to be trained as experts in information security.

I am an ACM Fellow (2018), an IEEE Fellow (2017) and an ACM Distinguished Scientist (2015).

Prior to joining the University of Helsinki, I spent seventeen years in industrial research, first with the Security Research Group at the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory (ZRL) (initially as a Pre-doctoral Fellow and eventually as a Research Staff Member) and then at Nokia Research Center (NRC), most recently as Distinguished Researcher. Before that I spent six years at MFCF at the University of Waterloo as a Unix Lizard. From March 2006 till December 2007, I also served as a part-time professor of at TML in the Helsinki University of Technology (now part of Aalto University).

While at NRC, I initiated and led several projects including the "On-board Credentials" project, co-designed the "secure simple pairing" protocols, deployed in Bluetooth devices from version 2.1 onwards, and jointly conceived and contributed to the GAIN project which led to the design of Generic Authentication Architecture. While at ZRL, I worked on the SEMPER project in which my primary responsibility was the design and implementation of the generic payment service framework. I also co-designed the fair exchange protocols in ZRL's Fair and Secure Electronic Transactions project.

I received my formal education at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, at the dear departed School of Computer and Information Science (now part of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science) at Syracuse University, and at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo.

If you want to know more about me, you can read the very nice article based on an interview by the UWaterloo School of Computer Science Communications Officer Joe Petrik.

Here is a pointer to my profile containing my current CV and standard bio (full version or short version) which have some more information. There is also a Wikipedia page.



Last modified: Sat, 30 Sep 2023 03:07:58 +0300