Stefan Brands’s blog

Dr. Stefan Brands is the founder and president of Credentica, a Montreal-based startup that delivers innovative identity and access management solutions. He holds a Ph.D. in cryptography from Technical University of Eindhoven and a M.Sc. in mathematics from University of Utrecht. Stefan is an Adjunct Professor in modern cryptology at McGill's School of Computer Science. In this capacity he co-supervises several M.Sc. and PhD students who are conducting cryptographic research in the area of digital identity and privacy. Stefan is a principal member of "On The Identity Trail" as well as of ADAPID, a Belgian R&D consortium that is designing a next-generation ID chipcard. Prior to joining Credentica, Stefan was a senior cryptographer at two pioneering privacy technology companies: Zero-Knowledge Systems (anonymous data transport) and Digicash (electronic cash). Stefan served in 2004 and 2005 on the external advisory committee of the Federal Privacy Commissioner of Canada, and is the author of a book on multi-party secure electronic authentication, published by The MIT Press with a foreword by prof. Ron Rivest. In the early nineties, Stefan designed the core e-cash protocols of a chipcard system that was implemented and piloted by two European consortiums that included Gemplus, Siemens, and several European banks.