Ivan Damgård
Ivan Bjerre Damgård is a Danish cryptographer and currently a professor at the Department of Computer Science, Aarhus University, Denmark.
In 1983, he obtained a master's degree in mathematics 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 and has been employed at Aarhus University ever since. Damgård was made full professor in 2005.
He is known among other things for the Merkle–Damgård construction used in most modern cryptographic hash functions such as SHA-1 and MD5. He discovered the structure independently of Ralph Merkle and published it in 1989.
Ivan Damgård is also one of the founders of the Cryptomathic company. In 2010, he was selected as IACR Fellow.
