Show Notes
Gilles has been a full Professor at the Université de Montréal for more than 45 years. He laid the foundations of quantum cryptography at a time when no one could have predicted that the quantum information revolution would usher in a multi-billion-dollar industry, much less that the United Nations would proclaim 2025 to be the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology. He is also among the inventors of quantum teleportation, which is one of the most fundamental pillars of the theory of quantum information. In addition to this, his research focuses on areas of classical cryptography, privacy amplification, quantum entanglement distillation, quantum pseudo-telepathy, the classical simulation of quantum entanglement, amplitude amplification and he discovered the first lower bound on the power of quantum computers. Currently, his main interest lies in the foundations of quantum theory. In 1996, he was elected to the Royal Society of Canada. In 2000, he won the Prix Marie-Victorin - the highest scientific award of the government of Quebec - and in 2006, he was elected as a Fellow of the International Association for Cryptologic Research. In 2009, Gille was awarded the Gerhard Herzberg Canada Gold Medal for Science and Engineering, and in 2011 the Killam Prize in Natural Sciences, which are Canada's highest scientific honours. In 2013, Gilles was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of London. He was named as an Officer in the Order of Canada in 2013 and in the Ordre national du Québec in 2017. In 2018, he became the first Canadian to receive the Wolf Prize in Physics, which is considered second only to the Nobel Prize for Physics. In 2019, he received the Micius Quantum Prize and the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Basic Sciences. In 2023, he was awarded the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics - the world's largest science prize. Furthermore, he has been granted honorary doctorates including from ETH Zürich, and the University of Ottawa.
More from ASecuritySite Podcast
Yael is the Ellen Shallow Richards Professor at MIT. She was previously a Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research. At the Weizmann Institute of Science, Yael worked with Adi Shamir and completed her PhD advised by Shafi Goldwasser at MIT in 2006. She was elected as a Fellow of the IACR in 2022 for foundational contributions in delegated computation and leakage-resilient cryptography, and service to the cryptographic community. She received the ACM Prize in Computing in 2022 for breakthroughs in verifiable delegation of computation and fundamental contributions to cryptography. Yael was a co-inventor of ring signatures, and has also shown the insecurity within the Fiat-Shamir heuristic. Along with Ron Rivest, and Adi Shamir, she published the classic paper of "How to leak a secret".
Claude is a professor at the École de Technologie Supérieure and obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT in 1990, working in the field of cryptography with Silvio Micali as his Ph.D. advisor and with Gilles Brassard as his MSc advisor. Claude was a member of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research program on Quantum Information Processing from 2002 to 2012 and is best known for his fundamental work in zero-knowledge proof, multi-party computing, quantum cryptography, and quantum teleportation. In 1993, along with Charles H. Bennett, Gilles Brassard, and others, Claude invented quantum teleportation. His 1988 STOC paper with David Chaum and Ivan Damgård on secure multi-party computation received the ACM STOC 30-year Test of Time Award in 2021. In 2013, he was elected as a Fellow of the IACR.
Yevgeniy is a Fellow of the IACR (International Association for Cryptologic Research), and a Professor of Computer Science at New York University. He has worked in a variety of areas, including secure messaging and end-to-end security, random number generation, LLM watermarking, cryptography with biometrics and other noisy data, hash function and block cipher design, protocol composition and information-theoretic cryptography. Some of his work on Random Number Generation, Hash Functions and Secure Messaging has had real-world impact (e.g., for Zoom, Microsoft, Apple and Signal, among others). In addition to being an IACR Fellow, Yevgeniy was the recipient of 2021 and 2019 IACR Test-of-Time Awards for his work on Fuzzy Extractors and Verifiable Random Functions. He has also won the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, Faculty Awards from AWS, Facebook, Google, IBM, Algorand, Protocol Labs, JP Morgan, Stellar Foundation and VMware, and the Best Paper Award at the 2005 Public Key Cryptography Conference.
David is a cryptographer and a professor at the École normale supérieure. He was previously a professor at Panthéon-Assas University. David is well known for his work in public-key cryptography, especially around the cryptanalysis of digital signature schemes. He co-designed the Naccache-Stern cryptosystem and the Naccache-Stern knapsack cryptosystem. David is also a visiting professor and researcher at the Information Security Group of Royal Holloway, University of London, and in 2020, was elected as a Fellow of the IACR.
Paul is a cryptographer and computer security researcher, and is currently a professor of computer science at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario. He previously held a Canada Research Chair in authentication and computer security and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (FRSC). Along with Alfred Menezes and Scott Vanstone, Paul was a co-author of the Handbook of Applied Cryptography, and the author of Computer Security and the Internet. In 2000, he was awarded The J.W. Graham Medal in Computing Innovation, and a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery in 2016 for his "contributions to applied cryptography, authentication and computer security.