Klaus Kursawe

Dr. Klaus Kursawe started working on Byzantine Fault tolerant protocols in 1998 in the context of the MAFTIA project, designing the first practical protocols for fully asynchronous ordering, for which he was awarded his PhD in 2001. He also worked on issues around practical implementation, such as membership management and performance optimisation. This work was published and shared at leading cryptographic and distributed systems conferences such as Crypto, ACM CCS and PODC, as well as implemented in IBMs Sintra and in part formally verified. He has since worked and taught in a wide area of cryptographic and security related activities, including in addition to byzantine fault tolerance topics like hardware security, IoT security, privacy, and the security of critical infrastructures, and has published about 50 peer-reviewed papers and book chapters. He also co-founded the ENCS, where he worked for four years as CTO and Chief Scientist. Back in the blockchain world, Dr Kursawe was advisor to the Chainspace project, performed the pre-publication security reviews for the consensus layer of the Libra protocol, and is now primarily working for the VEGA protocol.