Gene Itkis

Dr. Gene Itkis is a technical staff member in the Secure Resilient Systems and Technology Group at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. He is interested in various applications of cryptography. His current projects include cryptographic access control, in particular, with applications to cloud security. He has also been working on anti-tamper technologies, key management, biometrics, and other topics.

Itkis came to the Laboratory in 2009 after ten years at Boston University (BU), where he conducted research and taught courses in cryptography, algorithms, and other areas of computer science. While at BU, he served as the principal investigator for the National Science Foundation’s Trusted Computing grant; founded the Applied Cryptography and e-Security Group and the Industry Talks series; and served as the associate director for research at the Center for Reliable Information Systems and Cyber Security (RISCS), a National Security Agency National Center of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Education and Research. In 2006, he was a visiting scientist at MIT’s Cryptography and Information Security Group.

Prior to working at BU, Itkis was a senior researcher in NDS Technologies, where, as a security expert, he participated in the design and development of smart-card-based Conditional Access systems for pay TV, including interactive systems and electronic commerce. As chief architect of content protection, he defined NDS strategy and represented NDS in the Copy Protection Technical Working Group, Digital Audio and Video International Council (DAVIC), and MPEG-4. In DAVIC, he served as the vice chair, and led the security and content protection work.

Itkis holds an SB degree in physics from MIT. He received his PhD degree in computer science from BU, where his research in theoretical computer science was supervised by Professor Leonid Levin. He also spent two years as a postdoctoral researcher at the Technion in Israel, working with Professor Shimon Even on graph algorithms.