Ivan Bjerre Damgård (born 1956) is a Danish cryptographer and currently a professor at the Department of Computer Science,

Aarhus University Aarhus University ( da, Aarhus Universitet, abbreviated AU) is a public research university with its main campus located in Aarhus, Denmark. It is the second largest and second oldest university in Denmark. The university is part of the Coimbra G ...

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Academic background

In 1983, he obtained a master's degree in mathematics (with minors in

music Music is generally defined as the The arts, art of arranging sound to create some combination of Musical form, form, harmony, melody, rhythm or otherwise Musical expression, expressive content. Exact definition of music, definitions of mu ...

and

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to practical disciplines (includin ...

) at Aarhus University. He began his PhD studies in 1985 at the same university, and was for a period a guest researcher at CWI in Amsterdam in 1987. He earned his PhD degree in May, 1988, with the thesis ''Ubetinget beskyttelse i kryptografiske protokoller'' (Unconditional protection in cryptographic protocols) and has been employed at Aarhus University ever since. Damgård became full professor in 2005.

Research

Damgård co-invented the

Merkle–Damgård construction In cryptography, the Merkle–Damgård construction or Merkle–Damgård hash function is a method of building collision-resistant cryptographic hash functions from collision-resistant one-way compression functions. Goldwasser, S. and Bellare, M ...

, which is used in influential

cryptographic hash function A cryptographic hash function (CHF) is a hash algorithm (a map of an arbitrary binary string to a binary string with fixed size of n bits) that has special properties desirable for cryptography: * the probability of a particular n-bit output ...

s such as

SHA-2 SHA-2 (Secure Hash Algorithm 2) is a set of cryptographic hash functions designed by the United