Our PhD Graduates and A Talk with Taher ElGamal

Two of the great privileges of being a Professor happened today. Our PhD students graduated:

Will and Pavlos are two of the first Ph.D. students who have worked in the Blockpass ID Lab, and today they graduated. I have seldom been so proud of the work we are currently involved with (including homomorphic encryption, zero-knowledge proofs and digital wallets for EU citizens). At the core of their work is trust, cryptography and distributed ledgers — and we have moved so fast in just three years.

The other thing that happened today was a chat with the mighty Tahir ElGamal:

I have read his paper so many times and understand everything about his method in implementing ElGamal public key encryption and digital signatures. Along with this, Taher worked with so many interesting people, including Marty Hellman (who was his Ph.D. supervisor at Stanford) and Paul Kocher (who he met at Netscape).