Brown CS News

Okta Ventures, the venture investment arm of cloud-based identity solutions provider Okta, has recently announced the Identity 25, a list of trailblazers in the burgeoning field of digital identity, and Brown University’s James A. and Julie N. Brown Professor of Computer Science Anna Lysyanskaya is one of the honorees.

The inaugural list is intended to elevate emerging leaders who are enhancing identity, security, and privacy for businesses, consumers, and global citizens, and it includes a diverse set of academics, activists, public servants, entrepreneurs, standard-setters, and technology pioneers. 

This year’s honorees are actively involved in creating laws to thwart identity criminals, advocating for individual rights and privacy, combating fraud and abuse, developing new technologies, teaching strong identity principles to the next generation of leaders, and setting standards for a safe, interoperable digital world.  

Anna has been a Brown CS faculty member since 2002. A key theme of her research is balancing privacy with accountability, and she’s known for her foundational research in this area. Camenisch-Lysyanskaya signatures, which she co-created, provide the cryptographic basis for anonymous credentials, which allow users to prove that they possess required attributes without revealing any other information, such as personal identifiers. Her work has been incorporated into the Trusted Computing Group's industrial standard, served as the theoretical foundation for IBM Zurich's Idemix project, and informed the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC).

Anna’s accomplishments and service to her profession have been well-recognized in her field. The International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR) is the leading organization responsible for peer review of cryptographic research, and Anna has been a member of its Board of Directors for the past eleven years. She was also recognized by the IACR as a leading researcher by her appointment as Program Co-Chair of its annual CRYPTO conference, the most prominent scholarly publication venue in her field. Anna has also served on the Advisory Board and Board of Directors of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), a privacy watchdog and advocacy group. 

“I am honored,” Anna tells us, “and also optimistic that this recognition means that Okta and other industry leaders are serious about using privacy-preserving identity management.”

For a full list of honorees, click here.

For more information, click the link that follows to contact Brown CS Communications Manager Jesse C. Polhemus.