Kris Gaj

Biography

Kris Gaj received the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Warsaw University of Technology in Warsaw, Poland. He was a founder of Enigma, a Polish company that generates practical software and hardware cryptographic applications used by major Polish banks. At George Mason University, he does research and teaches courses in the area of cryptographic engineering, reconfigurable computing, and hardware security. His research projects center on new hardware architectures for public key cryptosystems (including five major families of post-quantum cryptosystems), secret key ciphers (including authenticated ciphers), hash functions, lightweight cryptography, and codebreaking, as well as benchmarking of cryptographic hardware, high-level synthesis, and software/hardware codesign. He is the co-director of the Cryptographic Engineering Research Group. He has been a member of the Program Committees of CHES, CryptArchi, CT-RSA, DATE, DSD, FPT, HASP, LightSec, PQCrypto, Quo Vadis Cryptology, ReConFig, ReCoSoc, and SPACE; a General Co-chair of CHES 2008 in Washington D.C., a Program Co-chair of CHES 2009 in Lausanne, Switzerland, and a Program Co-chair of SHARCS 2012 in Washington D.C. He is an author of a book on breaking German Enigma cipher during World War II, and a co-author of the book on Cryptographic Engineering. In 2013, he was awarded two patents for new Montgomery Multiplication Architectures.