Ian Miers

Postdoc at Cornell Tech working on applied cryptography and computer security. Founding scientist of Zcash.

Ian Miers is a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell Tech working on computer security and applied cryptography. His work takes a context-driven approach to making cryptographic systems secure, reasoning backwards from real world problems to design deployable cryptographic protocols that address the subtleties of security for production systems. This includes Zerocoin and Zerocash, the first systems to provide strongly private payments on top of public blockchains. It also includes works improving the security of mobile messaging, including attacks on iMessage and new techniques for forward secure encryption that guard against the exposure of encryption keys. He earned his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University under Prof. Matthew Green. His work has been featured in The Washington Post, The New York Times, Wired, The Economist, and denounced in at least 2 op-eds. He is one of the founders of Zcash, a privacy preserving cryptocurrency based on his work on Zerocash.