Jan Camenisch is CTO at the DFINITY Foundation and Director of the DFINITY Zurich Research Lab, building the Internet Computer. 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 the Chistera project USEIT on privacy and security for IoT. He and his team have participated in many other projects including ABC4Trust, AU2EU, FutureID, and FutureTPM. Jan has held an advanced ERC grant from 2013-2018 for research on cryptography for end users.