N. Asokan is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of
Waterloo (since 2019) where he holds a David R. Cheriton Chair and
serves as the Executive Director of the Waterloo Cybersecurity and
Privacy Institute (https://cpi.uwaterloo.ca/). He is also an adjunct
professor at Aalto University where he was the founding director of
the Helsinki-Aalto Institute for Cybersecurity (https://haic.fi).

He was a Professor of Computer Science at Aalto University from 2013
to 2019 and the University of Helsinki from 2012 to 2017. Between 1995
and 2012, he worked in industrial research laboratories designing and
building secure systems, first at the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory
as a Research Staff Member and then at Nokia Research Center (NRC),
most recently as Distinguished Researcher.

Asokan's primary research theme is systems security broadly, including
topics like the development and use of novel platform security features,
applying cryptographic techniques to design secure protocols for
distributed systems, applying machine learning techniques to security/privacy 
problems, and understanding/addressing the security and privacy of 
machine learning applications themselves.

At NRC, one of Asokan's primary responsibilities was to identify
potential new research areas for the security research group and doing
exploratory research paving the way for bigger research projects.  An
example research project he initiated at Nokia is on "generic
bootstrapping architecture" (GBA) which provides a systematic means to
bootstrap authentication service for new applications from the
existing cellular security infrastructure.  GBA is now standardized
by 3GPP, the leading standardization body for cellular communications.
Another example is "secure first connect" which allows ordinary users
to easily set up secure connectivity between their devices (e.g.,
setting up Bluetooth pairing between a phone and a PC).  Some aspects
of this work have been incorporated into "Bluetooth Secure Simple
Pairing" included in the Bluetooth specification from version 2.1
onwards.

Towards the end of his stint at NRC, Asokan led the "On-board
Credentials" (ObC) project which uses hardware security features
widely available on mobile devices to build a general-purpose platform
for provisioning, storing and using credentials for securing new
applications and services.  A significant attribute of ObC is that it
is "open" by design: any third-party application or service provider
and the device user can agree to start using ObC to protect access to
their assets without having to receive approval from the device
manufacturer or issuer.  ObC was subsequently available on Nokia Lumia (WP8)
devices as well as on Nokia Symbian devices.  

Asokan is an inventor of over 50 granted patents and several pending
patent applications.  He is an author of over 90 scientific research
papers. He has served as an associate editor-in-chief of IEEE Security & Privacy
Magazine, as an associate editor of Proceedings of PETS, as an associate 
editor of ACM Transactions on Information and Systems Security (ACM TISSEC, 
now known as ACM TOPS), and on the editorial boards of the IEEE Network
magazine and the Elsevier Computer Communications journal. He has served
on the steering committee of the ACM Wireless Security conference and
has served on the program committees of several security research
conferences. He has served on the evaluation panel for the prestigious
European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grants.

Asokan received his doctorate in Computer Science from the University
of Waterloo, MS in Computer and Information Science from Syracuse
University, and BTech (Hons.) in Computer Science and Engineering from
the Indian Institute of Technology at Kharagpur. He is an ACM Fellow,
an IEEE Fellow, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

For more information about Asokan's work see his website at
https://asokan.org/asokan/ or follow him on twitter @nasokan