Stefan Brands

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Stefan Brands is a Dutch information technologist specializing in multi-party security and privacy issues. Until February 2008, he was CEO and founder of Credentica, a company which commercialized his inventions in privacy-protecting digital credentials. In February 2008, Microsoft acquired the technology, and Stefan and his key colleagues joined Microsoft. Stefan is also Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at McGill University, Canada. He is the author of "Rethinking Public Key Infrastructures and Digital Certificates; Building in Privacy.^[1] As the journalist Wendy M. Grossman sums up ^[2], Stefan is the only person on the planet who has worked for both attempts prior to Credentica to commercialise privacy: DigiCash and Zero-Knowledge Systems. Both of these companies were in fact licensees of Stefan's technology at the time. The cryptographic ideas behind all three companies are traceable to David Chaum, whose 1992 Scientific American article^[3] introduced cryptographic "blinding" to deliver both security and privacy into transactions environments.