Kenny Paterson

Kenny Paterson is Professor of Computer Science at ETH Zurich, recovering mathematician, applied cryptography, security consulting. Kenny obtained a B.Sc. in 1990 from the University of Glasgow and a Ph.D. from the University of London in 1993, both in Mathematics. He was then a Royal Society Fellow at the Institute for Signal and Information Processing in the Department of Electronic Engineering at ETH Zurich, from 1993 to 1994. After that, he was a Lloyd's of London Tercentenary Foundation Research Fellow at Royal Holloway, University of London from 1994 to 1996. In 1996, he joined Hewlett-Packard Laboratories Bristol, becoming a project manager in 1999. He then joined the Information Security Group at Royal Holloway, University of London in 2001, becoming a Reader in 2002 and Professor in 2004. From March 2010 to May 2015, he was an EPSRC Leadership Fellow working on a project entitled Cryptography: Bridging Theory and Practice. In May 2015, he reverted to being a Professor of Information Security. Kenny joined ETH Zurich as a Professor of Computer Science in April 2019. Kenny's research over the last two decades has mostly been in the area of Cryptography, with a strong emphasis being on the analysis of deployed cryptographic systems and the development of provably secure solutions to real-world cryptographic problems. He co-founded the Real World Cryptography series of workshops to support the development of this broad area and to strengthen the links between academia and industry. He is co-chair of the IRTF's research group on Cryptography, CFRG. This group is working to provide expert advice to the IETF in an effort to strengthen the Internet's core security protocols. His research on the security of TLS (the Lucky 13 attack on CBC-mode encryption in TLS and attacks on RC4) received significant media attention, helped to drive the widespread adoption of TLS 1.2 with its support for modern encryption schemes, and was an important factor in the TLS Working Group's decision to abandon legacy encryption mechanisms in TLS 1.3. Other career highlights include serving as Programme Chair for EUROCRYPT 2011, being an invited speaker at ASIACRYPT 2014, and becoming editor-in-chief of the Journal of Cryptology in 2017. Kenny was made a fellow of the IACR in 2017, for "research and service contributions spanning theory and practice, and improving the security of widely deployed protocols".