Crypto Valley Conference on Blockchain Technology

Alessandro is a research staff member in the blockchain group of IBM Research – Zurich. Prior to joining IBM, he was a member of the Security & Trust research program of SAP Research. He has been engaged in several EU projects including Avantssar (formal validation of security properties in service-oriented infrastructures) and TClouds (security and reliability in cloud computing). He has also been a member of the SAP Product Security Team, acting as an internal security consultant for SAP business units. His current research interests revolve around the study of security and reliability aspects of storage systems (if you want to know more you can take a look here). Alessandro holds a PhD in applied cryptography from Telecom ParisTech (former Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications, Paris) and a double MSc degree from Politecnico di Torino (Turin, Italy) in Computer Science and from EURECOM in Networking.

Jan Camenisch is Head of Research at Dfinity and Director of the Dfinity Zurich Research Lab. He also serves on Sovrin‘s Technical Governance Board. Before joining Dfinity, Jan was a Principal Research Staff Member at IBM Research – Zurich, where he was leading the Privacy & Cryptography research team and was a member of the IBM Academy of Technology. He is a leading scientist in the area of privacy and cryptography and a Fellow of the IACR, IEEE, and ACM. Jan has published over 140 widely cited papers, was granted about 140 patents worldwide, and has received a number of awards for his work, including the 2010 ACM SIGSAC outstanding innovation award, the 2013 IEEE computer society technical achievement award, and the 2018 IFIP Kristian Beckman award. Jan is the main inventor of Identity Mixer, a unique cryptographic protocol suite for privacy-preserving authentication and transfer of certified attributes. Identity mixer has been integrated into Hyperledger Fabric and forms the cryptographic core of Sovrin. Jan was also key in designing the related Direct Anonymous Attestation (DAA) and making the protocol a TCG standard that got implemented in millions of devices. Lately, Jan was involved in bringing the newest protocol variant of DAA to FIDO and W3C web authentication. Jan was leading the FP7 European research consortia PRIME and PrimeLife on privacy and identity management and currently leads the Chistera project USEIT. He and his team have participated in many other projects including ABC4Trust, AU2EU, FutureID, and FutureTPM. Jan held an advanced ERC grant from 2013-2018 for cryptography research.

Srdjan Capkun (Srđan Čapkun) is a Full Professor in the Department of Computer Science, ETH Zurich and Director of the Zurich Information Security and Privacy Center (ZISC). He was born in Split, Croatia. He received his Dipl.Ing. Degree in Electrical Engineering / Computer Science from the University of Split in 1998, and his Ph.D. degree in Communication Systems from EPFL in 2004. Prior to joining ETH Zurich in 2006 he was a postdoctoral researcher in the Networked & Embedded Systems Laboratory (NESL), University of California Los Angeles and an Assistant Professor in the Informatics and Mathematical Modelling Department, Technical University of Denmark (DTU). His research interests are in system and network security. His focus areas are wireless security (in particular secure positioning), and system security where he focuses on trusted computing and blockchain technologies. He is a co-founder of 3db Access, a company focusing on secure distance measuement and proximity-based access control, and of Sound-Proof a spin-off focusing on usable on-line authentication. In 2016 he received an ERC Consolidator Grant for a project on securing positioning in wireless networks.