Ben Smeets, Professor

 

  Ben Smeets was born in 1956 in Echt, The Netherlands. He received the diploma engineer degree from Technical University of Eindhoven in 1983 and the Lic. and Ph.D. degrees from Lund University in 1985 and 1987. His Ph.D. thesis was “Some results on linear recurring sequences,” and was supervised by Rolf Johannesson and Tore Herlestam. He served as Lektor at Lund during 1987–1992. He achieved docent status in 1990 and in 1992 he obtained the chair in Digital Techniques. During 1998–2002 he was with Ericsson Mobile Communications AB in Lund, as their chief staff member in the area of cryptography and data security; between January 2003 and February 2007 he has been sharing his time between Ericsson and the Information Technology Department at Lund University as the department head. In January 2009  he returned to Ericsson but keeps teaching at the University and started research on security aspects of virtualisation and secure execution environment and confidential compute technologies.

 Ben Smeets' main research interests are cryptography, coding theory, digital switching theory, and data compression. His interests focus particularly on research problems that interrelate cryptography, information theory and coding. Work in the past two decades considers various security aspects and implementation work for mobile phones as well as research on secure execution environements, hypervisors, and security solutions for near field communication. Recent research is much focussed on trusted and confidential computing and the design of revocation schemes that are pratical in cloud native based telco networks,

 In 1989 he was two months at the Inst. for Problems of Information Transmission, USSR Academy of Sciences, Moscow where he worked on convolutional codes. During part of 1997 he was a visiting researcher at Ericsson Eurolab GmbH, Nurnberg, where he contributed to the ETSI CTS homebase station standard as well to the Bluetooth security design.  Ben Smeets has served on several program committees for the Eurocrypt, Crypto, and IEEE Information Theory Symposia. In 2000, he was part of the ETSI SAGE team that designed the UMTS f8 stream cipher based on the KASUMI block cipher. In 2005 he received the Ericsson Inventor of the Year Award. Currently he is a Senior Expert at Ericsson in the area of Trusted and Confidential Computing.