N. Asokan is a Distinguished Researcher with the Radio Systems
Laboratory at Nokia Research Center where he leads the Security and
Networking Protocols research group. He also served as a part-time
professor at the Helsinki University of Technology from March 2006
till December 2007.  Asokan has been conducting research in building
secure systems for over fifteen years, first at the IBM Zurich
Research Laboratory and then at Nokia Research Center. His primary
research interest has been in applying cryptographic techniques to
design secure protocols for distributed systems. Recently, he has also
been investigating the use of Trusted Computing technologies for
securing endnodes, and ways to make secure systems usable.

At Nokia Research Center, one of Asokan's primary responsibilities has
been to identify potential new research areas for the security
research group and doing exploratory research paving the way for
bigger research projects.  An example research project he initiated at
Nokia is on "generic bootstrapping architecture" (GBA) which provides
a systematic means to bootstrap authentication service for new
applications from the existing cellular security infrastructure.  GBA
is now a specification of 3GPP, the leading standardization body for
cellular communications.  Another example is "secure first connect"
which allows ordinary users to easily set up secure connectivity
between their devices (e.g., setting up Bluetooth pairing between a
phone and a PC).  Some aspects of this work have been included as the
new "Bluetooth Secure Simple Pairing" included in the Bluetooth
specification from version 2.1 onwards.

During the past few years, he has been leading the "On-board
Credentials" (ObC) project which uses hardware security features
widely available on mobile devices to build a general-purpose platform
for provisioning, storing and using credentials for securing new
applications and services.  A significant attribute of ObC is that it
is "open" by design: any third-party application or service provider
and the device user can agree to start using ObC to protect access to
their assets without having to receive approval from the device
manufacturer or issuer.  ObC is now available on Nokia Anna and Belle
devices and is under development for additional mobile phone
platforms.  Recently he initiated an exploratory research activity
called "Intuitive and Sensible Access Control" (ISAC) which attempts
simply an ordinary user's burden of configuring security and privacy
policies by making inferences from the history of contextual
observations made from the user's device.

Asokan is an inventor of over 20 granted patents and several pending
patent applications.  He is an author of over 50 scientific research
papers.  He serves on the steering committee of the ACM Wireless
Security conference and has served on the program committees of
several security research conferences.  He also served on the
editorial boards of the IEEE Network magazine and the Elsevier
Computer Communications journal.

Asokan received his doctorate in Computer Science from the University
of Waterloo, MS in Computer and Information Science from Syracuse
University, and BTech (Hons.) in Computer Science and Engineering from
the Indian Institute of Technology at Kharagpur.

For more information about Asokan's work see his website at
http://asokan.org/asokan or send him e-mail at asokan~at~acm~dot~org