Prof. Dr. Peter Y. A. Ryan

In February of 2009, Peter Ryan took up a position as full Professor of Applied Security at the University of Luxembourg. He has over 20 years of experience in cryptography, information assurance and formal verification. He pioneered the application of process algebras to modelling and analysis of secure systems, presenting the first process algebra (CSP) formulation of non-interference at the Computer Security Foundations Workshop in 1989. In 1993, while at DRA, he initiated and led the "Modelling and Analysis of Security Protocols" research project that developed the process algebraic and model-checking approach to the analysis of security protocols. This project broke away from the trend of employing bespoke analysis frameworks such as the epistemic BAN-logic and used mainstream formal methods notations and tools. Notable achievements of this project were the discovery by Gavin Lowe of the now famous flaw in the Needham-Schroeder Public Key protocol that had lain undiscovered for around 17 years.

Ryan has published extensively on cryptography, cryptographic protocols, mathematical models of computer security and, most recently, high assurance voting systems. He is the creator of Prêt à Voter, Pretty Good Democracy (with Vanessa Teague) and OpenVote (with Feng Hoa) and Selene (with P Roenne and V Iovino) verifiable voting schemes. With Feng Hao he proposed the Password Authenticated Key Establishment Protocol J-PAKE.

Prior to joining the University of Luxembourg he was a Professor of Computing Science at Newcastle University. He has worked at GCHQ, the Defence Research Agency, the Stanford Research Institute, Cambridge and the Software Engineering Institute, CMU Pittsburgh.

He holds a PhD in mathematical physics from the University of London.

Peter Ryan has been on program committees of numerous prestigious security conferences, notably: IEEE Security and Privacy, IEEE Computer Security Foundations Workshop, the European Symposium On Research In Computer Security (ESORICS), WITS (Workshop on Issues in Security). He was Chair of WITS’04 (Workshop on Issues in the Theory of Security) and Co-chair of ESORICS in 2004 and 2015, co-chair of Frontiers of Electronic Elections FEE 2005, Chair WOTE 2007 (Workshop On Trustworthy Elections). From 1999 to 2007 he was the Chair of the ESORICS Steering Committee. He founded and co-chaired the new workshop series Voting’16 and Voting’17 in association with Financial Crypto.

He is a Visiting Professor at the University of Surrey and the ENS Paris.

Research topics: Information assurance, cryptography, cryptographic protocols, design and analysis of secure systems and properties, analysis of information flow, fully verifiable voting schemes, quantum cryptography and the socio-technical aspects of security.

• The book "Modelling and Analysis of Security Protocols" is now available online
• “The New Codebreakers”, Festschrift in honour of David Kahn, Springer
• to appear: “Real-World Electronic Voting”, CRC Press

Last updated on: Thursday, 07 November 2019