N. Asokan is a principal scientist with Nokia Research Center in
Helsinki.  He also served as a part-time professor at the Helsinki
University of Technology from March 2006 till December 2007.  Asokan
has been conducting research in building secure systems for over ten
years, first at the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory and then at Nokia
Research Center. His primary research interest has been in applying
cryptographic techniques to design secure protocols for distributed
systems. Recently, he has also been investigating the use of Trusted
Computing technologies for securing endnodes, and ways to make secure
systems usable.

At Nokia Research Center, one of Asokan's primary responsibilities as
principal scientist has been 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 a specification of 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
included as the new "Bluetooth Secure Simple Pairing" included
in the Bluetooth 2.1 specification.

Asokan is an inventor of twelve granted patents and several pending
patent applications.  He is an author of over 40 scientific research
papers and serves on the program committees of several security
research conferences.  He also serves on the editorial board of IEEE
Network magazine.

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.

For more information about Asokan's work see his website at
http://asokan.org/asokan or send him e-mail at asokan~at~acm~dot~org