Philippe Janson

Biography

Phil Janson got a BS in EE from the University of Brussels and MS, EE, and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From 1976 to 1996 he held a tenured visiting lecturer position in Operating Systems at the U. of Brussels. In 1976 he joined IBM Research in Zurich, where he worked initially on high-speed packet switches and the IBM Token Ring. In 1986 he worked on LAN gateways at the IBM Development Lab in Austin, Texas. Back in Zurich in 1987 he managed several projects on heterogeneous networking and IT security. In 1995 he became head of the Computer Science Department at IBM Research's Zurich Lab. In 1995 he was elected to the IBM Academy of Technology, of which he was Vice President in 2000 and 2001, serving at the same time as Program Manager for University Relations at IBM Research's Zurich Lab. From 1995 to 2007 he was also Relationship Manager for Europe between IBM Research and the IBM Financial Services Sector. In 2001 he became a member of the Advisory Board of the Informatics and Communication Systems Dept of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technolgy in Lausanne (EPFL) and became a member of the Research Council of the Swiss National Foundation. From 2002 to 2004 he returned to an active research career as Senior Technical Staff Member, working on Web Services security. From 2004 to 2007 he was Program Manager for leveraging IBM Research Assets in IBM Global Services engagements. From 2007 to 2009 he managed a Research team focusing on user-centric identity and authentication technologies. In 2010 he retired from IBM then joined EPFL as a Professor, teaching IT security engineering and Introductory Computer Science until retiring in 2017. 2018-2019 he developed and gave cyberdefense courses for the Swiss armed forces. He holds a dozen patents and wrote over 50 papers in the areas of IT security and distributed systems as well as a book on Operating Systems. He received a Harkness Fellowship in 1972, and a number of IBM Invention and Outstanding Technical Contribution Awards since then. He was a member of the ACM and of the IEEE Computer Society.

Official source

https://people.epfl.ch/philippe.janson

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One significant challenge in building grids between organizations with heterogeneous security systems is the need to express and enforce security policies that specify the users in one organization (the source domain) who are allowed to access the resources in another organization (the target domain). This requires linking the syntax and semantics of security assertions referring to users and their attributes in the source domain to those referring to resources in the target domain. This paper suggests some basic requirements for solving this problem, in particular, an abstract form of interdomain security assertion (IDSA) relying, for instance, on globally meaningful URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers) to refer to users, resources, and their attributes. This canonical abstract form IDSA is, however, used strictly for assertion mapping purposes. It may - but need not - be visible in any concrete security assertion syntax in any domain. The paper further suggests different scenarios in which URIs for users, resources, and attributes defined in one domain can be mapped to semantically meaningful references - with varying degrees of granularity and accountability - in another domain where they would otherwise be meaningless. © 2004 IBM.

2004

Scalability and flexibility in authentication services: The KryptoKnight approach

Philippe Janson

This paper studies the issues of flexibility and scalability in the context of network security. In particular, it concentrates on authentication and key distribution services suited for a variety of communication paradigms, network environments, and end-devices. We present the design criteria, specification, and step-by-step construction of authentication and key distribution services based on experience in the KryptoKnight project. The central goal of the KryptoKnight project was the construction of basic network security functions in a minimal, flexible (thus, versatile) and scalable manner. Protocol minimality (in terms of resource usage) and flexibility are not merely theoretical goals; they have clear advantages in environments where computational resources are limited and connectivity is restricted. KryptoKnight was aimed at such environments: small and anemic wireless devices, simple network and data-link entities, embedded micro-devices and other special-purpose communication equipment and configurations. Furthermore, scalability of protocols makes their deployment possible in the presence of rapid network growth and inter-domain communication.

1997

State of the art in electronic payment systems

Philippe Janson

The exchange of goods conducted face-to-face between two parties dates back to before the beginning of recorded history. Traditional means of payment have always had security problems, but now electronic payments retain the same drawbacks and add some risks. Unlike paper, digital `documents' can be copied perfectly and arbitrarily often; digital signatures can be produced by anybody who knows the secret cryptographic key; a buyer's name can be associated with every payment, eliminating the anonymity of cash. Without new security measures, wide-spread electronic commerce is not viable. On the other hand, properly designed electronic payment systems can actually provide better security than traditional means of payments, in addition to flexibility. This article provides an overview of electronic payment systems, focusing on issues related to security.

1997