ASecuritySite Podcast

Fireside Chat: Bruce Schneier

A fireside chat from the International Conference on Digital Trust, AI and the Future. 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. Cu...

International Conference on Digital Trust, AI and the Future: Federico Charosky

Federico Charosky, CEO Quroum CyberFederico is a seasoned cybersecurity executive with over 25 years of distinguished experience across the Americas, Europe, and the Middle East. He specialises in cyber risk management, security operations, and incident response, Federico has dedicated his career to safeguarding organisations against the ever-evolving landscape of digital threats. In 2016, he founded Quorum Cyber, a premier cybersecurity firm backed by private equity, headquartered in Edinburgh ...

International Conference in Digital Trust, AI and the Future: Colin Cook

International Conference on Digital Trust, AI and the Future: Blockchain/DLT in Financial Services

Chair: Stephen Ingledew OBE, Chair, Fintech Scotland Nishant Govil: MD, Innovation Adoption, BlackRock Kara Kennedy: Head of Digital Assets, JP Morgan Nick Jones: CEO Zumo. Dia Banerji: Imagine Ventures.

International Conference on Digital Trust, AI and the Future: Blockchain/DLT in Business and Society

Date: 24 June 2025 Chair: Peter Ferry, CEO, TRUST Centre of Excellence. Martin Doherty Hughes: Former MP, Chair of All Party Parliamentary Group on Blockchain. Martin Trotter: Regtech leader, BRS Grant Thornton Martin Halford: CTO SICCAR and Tech Steering Committee Accord Project Chris Tate: CEO Condatis.

World-leaders in Cryptography: Ralph C Merkle

Ralph is a co-inventor of public-key cryptography, the inventor of cryptographic hashing, created Merkle's Puzzles, the co-inventor of the Merkle–Hellman knapsack cryptosystem, and invented Merkle trees. He received his B.S. in computer science in 1974 from UC Berkeley and a PhD. in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1979. More recently, he is a researcher and speaker on cryonics. Ralph was a research scientist at the famous Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), and a nanotechn...

World-leaders in Cryptography: Rosario Gennaro

Rosario Gennaro is a Professor of Computer Science at City University of New York (CUNY) and a Director for the Center for Algorithms and Interactive Scientific Software (CAISS). 1996, he received his PhD from MIT and was a researcher at the IBM T.J.Watson Research Center until 2012. Rosario's most recent work includes privacy and anonymity in electronic communication, along with proactive security to minimise the effects of system break-ins. He has received over 24,500 citations on his work and...

World-leaders in Cryptography: Tal Rabin

Tal is a Professor of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania and a Manager at AWS. Previously, she was the head of research at the Algorand Foundation and head of the cryptography research at IBM's Thomas J Watson Research Centre. In 2014, she was defined as one of the 22 most powerful women engineers by Business Insider, and a Woman of Vision for innovation by the Anita Borg Institute. In 2018, she was defined by Forbes as one of the World's Top 50 women in Tech, and...

World-leaders in Cryptography: Vinod Vaikuntanathan

Vinod is a professor of computer science at MIT and a principal investigator in the IT Computer Science and AI Lab. He completed his Bachelor's degree from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras in 2003, and his PhD in 2009 from MIT. His main supervisor was Shafi Goldwasser. Vinod is seen as a world leader in the area of cryptography, especially within fully homomorphic encryption. He has co-authored many classic papers and which are seen as third generation of homomorphic encryption, includi...

World-leaders in Cryptography: Srini Devadas

Srini Devadas an Edwin Sibley Webster Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). His current research interests are in applied cryptography, computer security and computer architecture. Srini was awarded an a master's and a PhD degree in electrical engineering from the University of California at Berkeley - under the supervision of Arthur Richard Newton. He was an inventor of Physical Unclonable Function...

World-leaders in Cybersecurity: Don Smith

Don Smith leads the CTU Threat Research group at Secureworks. His career starting with the creation of dns in 2005, and which was acquired by SecureWorks in 2009. He has extensive knowledge in cybersecurity and is seen as a world-leader in the field. Don is also the industry co-chair of the Strategic Cyber Industry Group in the National Cybercrime Unit at the UK National Crime Agency and a member of the UK National Cyber Advisory Board. He is also the co-chair of the Cyber League at the NCSC....

World-leaders in Cryptography: Jonathan Katz

Jonathan was a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland. He is now a Senior Staff Research Scientist at Google, with a core focus on cryptography and cybersecurity. Jonathan received his BS degree in mathematics and chemistry from MIT in 1996, and, in 2002, completed a PhD in computer science from Columbia University. He wrote a classic textbook on cryptography, and which is in its 3rd edition. Jonathon also has an online course on Coursera and has given tuto...

Innovators in Cryptography and Blockchain: Maciej Zurawski

Maciej Zurawski is technology entrepreneur and blockchain specialist with over 25 years of experience in commercial software development, R&D and business leadership. He is currently the CEO at Redeem Technologies, and serves as the Executive Director of Blockchain Scotland - the principal industry association advancing commercial blockchain adoption across Scotland. His expertise spans enterprise software architecture, artificial intelligence and decentralised systems, complemented by a doc...

Innovators in Cryptography and Blockchain: Greg McLardie

Greg McLardie has 30 years of executive experience in the USA, Australia, Japan, China and now the UK with the likes of Procter & Gamble and EY. He co-created Two Hands and has been operating for over 5 years in Australia and China, with Forbes Magazine publishing a three-page feature on its unique blockchain application in the food industry. With strong traction internationally, Two Hands has established a company and transferred global IP to the UK to attract investment to scale its impact...

World-leaders in Cryptography: Moti Yung

Moti is a Security and Privacy Research Scientist with Google and an Adjunct Research Faculty member at the Computer Science Dep of Columbia University. He received his PhD from Columbia University in 1988. In 2010 he gave the IACR Distinguished Lecture and has also been the recipient of the 2014 ACM’s SIGSAC Outstanding Innovation award, the 2014 ESORICS (European Symposium on Research in Computer Security) Outstanding Research award, an IBM Outstanding Innovation award, a Google OC award, and ...

Innovators in Cryptography and Blockchain: Jamie Gilchrist

Jamie is the CTO at Umazi, the Head of Research at DataFair.ai and co-founder and CEO of Tunestamp.

World-leaders in Cryptography: Aggelos Kiayias

Aggelos Kiayias is a professor at the University of Edinburgh and the chief science officer at Input Output Global (formerly IOHK). He received his PhD in 2002 from City University of New York. He is chair in cyber security and privacy, and director of the Blockchain Technology Laboratory at the University of Edinburgh. In 2021, Aggelos was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE), and was recently awarded the BCS Lovelace Medal 2024 for his transformative contributions to the the...

World-leaders in Cryptography: Anna Lysyanskaya

Anna is a Professor of Computer Science at Brown University. Her research spans many areas of advanced cryptography including with digital signatures, group signatures, blind signatures, e-cash and anonymous digital credentials. She was originally from Ukraine, and undertook her masters degree at MIT in 1999, and then went onto a PhD in 2002 in the areas of Signature Schemes and Applications to Cryptographic Protocol Design. She joined Brown University in 2002, and was made a full professor in 2...

Apple Steps Back Their Security

The fallback for law enforcement agencies has always been the place where files are stored, and all the best encryption within end-to-end communications will not stop unencrypted files at rest from being examined. But when the user encrypts data into the Cloud and where they hold their own keys, that’s when the nightmare begins for them. The rise of cybersecurity on the Internet Let’s pinpoint the start of cybersecurity on the Internet to the 1970s. This saw the rise of the Lucifer cipher and sa...

Samsung S25 Goes PQC

YouTube: https://youtu.be/hcdk3u2R5Mo Yesterday, I gave two short presentations on PQC (Post Quantum Cryptography), and next week, I’m in London to give a more focused talk on the subject. And so, it’s great to see that Samsung is driving forward the adoption of PQC methods in their new S25 smartphone. There are two companies that have a core focus on creating trusted hardware for consumers: Apple and Samsung. Apple has always had a core focus on making sure they use the best cryptography to not...

Leaders in Digital Trust/Blockchain: Aysegul Sensoy

Aysegul Sensoy has over 20 years of management experience with blockchain, emerging technologies, fintech, business development, marketing and sales. She is currently the chair of the Istanbul Blockchain Women Association and CIS Regional Manager of Fuze Finance. She received her bachelor's degree in economics from Istanbul University and her master's degree in marketing communications management from Galatasaray University, as well as getting an executive MBA. She entered the tech sector after ...

World-leaders in Cryptography: Amit Sahai

Amit is a professor of computer science at UCLA and is the director of the Center for Encrypted Functionalities. Amit has been cited in his research work over 63,000 times and has an h-index of 91. In 2000, he graduated with a PhD from MIT and then moved to Princeton. In 2004, he then moved to UCLA. Over the years, he has made so many great advancements, including being the co-inventor of many areas of cryptography, including indistinguishability obfuscation schemes, functional encryption, attri...

World-leaders in Cryptography: Bart Preneel

Bart is a Professor in the Electrical Engineering department at KU Leuven in Belgium. He co-invented the Miyaguchi (Meya-Goochy)–Preneel scheme and which converts a block cipher into a hash function. Bart is also one of the co-inventors of the RIPEMD-160 hashing method, and which is used in Bitcoin addresses. He also co-designed the stream ciphers MUGI and Trivium, the MAC Algorithms Chaskey and MDxMAC and the authenticated encryption algorithm AEGIS that is used to encryption of data at rest io...

World-leaders in Cryptography: Ivan Damgard

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 ...

World-leaders in Cryptography: Chris Peikert

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 2...

World-leaders in Cryptography: Clifford Cocks

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 ...

Bill Buchanan Chats With Debbie Reynolds (The Data Diva)

Bill Buchanan Chats With Debbie Reynolds (The Data Diva). Debbie's podcast is here: https://www.debbiereynoldsconsulting.com/podcast

World-leaders in Cryptography: Vadim Lyubashevsky

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 foun...

World-leaders in Cryptography: Matthew Green

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...

World Leaders in Cryptography: Alfred Menezes

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://cryptograph...