World-leaders in Cryptography: Bart Preneel

Bart is a Professor in the Electrical Engineering department at KU Leuven in Belgium. He co-invented the Miyaguchi (Meya-Goochy)–Preneel scheme and which converts a block cipher into a hash function. Bart is also one of the co-inventors of the RIPEMD-160 hashing method, and which is used in Bitcoin addresses. He also co-designed the stream ciphers MUGI and Trivium, the MAC Algorithms Chaskey and MDxMAC and the authenticated encryption algorithm AEGIS that is used to encryption of data at rest ion Google cloud. Bart was the President of the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR) from 2008 to 2013 and one of his hobbies is conducting the University of Leuven Bigband and playing saxophone in a Dixieland band.Bart consults for industry and government on cybersecurity and privacy.   He founded the mobile authentication startup nextAuth and holds roles in Approach Belgium, Tioga Capital Partners, and Nym Technologies. During the pandemic he co-designed the DP-3T scheme for privacy-friendly contact tracing and managed the Belgian Coronalert app.  Actively engaged in cybersecurity policy, he contributes to ENISA as an Advisory Group member for the EU.