Jan Camenisch

Co-inventor of Identity Mixer, a unique cryptographic protocol suite for privacy-preserving authentication and transfer of certified attributes, Camenisch is a leading scientist in the area of privacy and cryptography. He has served as a Principal Research Staff Member at IBM Research – Zurich, leading the Privacy & Cryptography research team. From the very early stages of his career, he conducted cutting-edge research that pioneered an active line of work on privacy-enhancing technologies and cryptographic tools for the construction of efficient protocols. His team has been recognized as probably the world-leading research group in privacy-enhancing technologies. He also fostered the real-world adoption of such technologies by leading and initiating international research projects.

Identity Mixer allows users to minimize the personal data they have to reveal in online transactions. For instance, if electronic identity (eID) cards were realized with Identity Mixer, then teenagers possessing such eID cards could log onto a teenage chat room just proving that they are indeed 12–15 years of age without revealing any other information stored on the card such as their name or address.

He also led the FP7 European research consortia PRIME and PrimeLife, and he and his team participated in many other projects including AU2EU, Witdom, and ABC4Trust, an EU-funded research and development project advancing the federation and interchangeability of technologies supporting trustworthy and at the same time privacy-preserving Attribute-based Credentials (Privacy-ABCs). Camenisch has held an advanced ERC grant. He received a Diploma in Electrical Engineering in 1993 and a Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1998, both from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETHZ). From 1998 until 1999 he served as Research Assistant Professor in Computer Science at the University of Aarhus, Denmark.

He has published over 100 widely cited papers and received a number of awards for his work, including the 2010 ACM SIGSAC Outstanding Innovation Award and the 2013 IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award "For pioneering theoretical work on privacy-enhancing cryptographic protocols and leadership in their practical realization." Camenisch is a member of the IBM Academy of Technology and an IEEE Fellow.