Marten van Dijk has an abiding interest in how to realize secure computation offering confidentiality as well as verifiability, and in how security guarantees can be modelled and proved. As endowed professor in Secure and Intelligent Computing he will be working at the intersection of security and machine learning and will focus on how machine learning can provide reliable and robust intelligence. “I really want to make a contribution towards making our society a secure place with digital and physical infrastructures that are reliable”, Van Dijk says.
Van Dijk heads the Computer Security research group at CWI, the national research institute for mathematics and computer science in the Netherlands and has more than 20 years of research experience in secure computation. He acquired this experience both in academia (Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University of Connecticut in the USA) and in industry (Philips Research and RSA Laboratories). He received the A. Richard Newton Technical Impact Award in Electronic Design Automation in 2015 and the Most Frequently Cited Paper Award (2000-2009), Symposium on VLSI Circuits, for his collaboration on Physical Unclonable Functions.
Aegis, the first single-chip secure processor that encrypts and verifies the integrity of external memory and introduced the concept of secure containers, was selected for inclusion in ‘25 years of International Conference on Supercomputing’ in 2014 and got a Test of Time Award from Intel in 2022. This concept is in widespread use in Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs), such as the Intel SGX processor, which can be found nowadays in industry. The RAM protocol ‘Path ORAM’ received a best paper award at CCS 2013 and was selected as a 2018 Top Pick in Hardware and Embedded Security. Marten van Dijk is an IEEE Fellow for his contributions to secure processor design and encrypted calculations. Van Dijk is a member of the advisory council of ACCSS, the association of all the scientists working in the field of cybersecurity in the Netherlands and is chair of the Special Interest Group Cyber Security (SIG-CS) under ICT Research Platform Nederland (IPN).
Photo: CWI