N. Asokan

Professor N. Asokan is a faculty member at the Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo, where he joined as a Cheriton Chair in September 2019. He leads key initiatives as the Executive Director of Waterloo’s Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute and contributes to foundational research as a Principal Investigator at the Private AI Collaborative Research Institute, funded by Intel Labs and industry partners.

• Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (2023)
• IEEE Fellow (2017)
• ACM Fellow (2019)
• ACM SIGSAC Outstanding Innovation Award (2018)

His research spans network and systems security, with groundbreaking work on optimistic fair exchange protocols, secure device pairing (adopted into Bluetooth standards), and trusted execution environments (TEEs) for mobile platforms. Recently, he has focused on AI security and privacy, including model extraction attacks and AI-driven cybersecurity for IoT, with techniques integrated into Intel’s OpenFL framework.

Professor Asokan advises doctoral students like Vasisht Duddu (IBM PhD Fellow) and Anudeep Das (best paper award at CODASPY2025), while former students Buse Gul Atli (Linköping University) and Seb Szyller (Aalto University) transition from industry research to academic careers.

He actively collaborates with industry through the Private AI Institute and organizes the Grad Conference, a unique event bridging cybersecurity/privacy graduate students with regional industry partners.