YIANNIS TSIOUNIS, Ph.D.

 

81 Greene St., 2nd Floor

New York, NY 10012

Office: (212) 324 5764, Home: (212) 226 4585

E-mail: yiannis@cs.neu.edu

 

Summary: Innovative, high-energy senior Information Technology executive with deep IT industry knowledge, entrepreneurial mindset, and focus on execution.

Demonstrated ability to build strategic business plans, design state-of-the-art systems, assemble and guide dedicated teams, and execute under pressure and on time.

Cross-functional expertise in financing, business development, marketing, operations and human resources. Ability to view IT in a bottom-line oriented way and in alignment with other business functions.

 

Expertise: Electronic Commerce, Transaction Processing, Electronic Payments, Financial Systems, Cryptography, IT security, Network Protocols and Design, Internet, Wireless Security

 

Professional Experience

 

InternetCash Corporation, New York, NY.                                                               5/99 – current

Co-founder, director and Chief Technology Officer

Laid the plans and built InternetCash as an Infrastructure company, creating the only secure alternative payment network on the Internet.

-   Guided InternetCash from conception to offerings of anonymous pre-paid InternetCash cards, Person-to-Person payments, Co-branded Gift Certificate Programs, Business to Business payments, as well as Business to Consumer payments.

-   Identified business opportunities in transaction processing and B2B payment systems.

-   Participated in fund-raising activities. Raised $2M in series A financing round, $5M in series B round, $400K in bridge financing.

-   Authored and submitted 3 International Patents.

-   Managed $7M IT budget.

-   Designed the communication and security protocols for all the company’s products.

-   Guided the implementation of security, privacy, architecture and infrastructure.

-   Built 24x7, fault tolerant (99.99% uptime) infrastructure capable of tens of transactions per second, to support the transaction processing requirements of the company.

-   Architected the InternetCash Payment Protocol to be compatible with and supporting of emerging technologies, such as WAP and Smart-Card payments.

-   Built, lead, motivated and managed technical team of 40 employees.

-   Implemented Software Engineering Processes, Development, Infrastructure and Documentation procedures, 24x7 uptime and monitoring practices.

-   Worked with Sales, Marketing and Management team to design and implement market-leading products and services.

-   Managed outside vendors for Communications, Software, Hardware and outsourced development. Negotiated vendor contracts.

-   Educated both technical and management teams on cryptographic principles and secure payment systems.

-   Authored all White Papers for InternetCash.

-   Organized and authored a major part of the internal Technical Documentation for reference and Due-Diligence purposes.

 

GTE Laboratories, Inc., Waltham, MA.                                                                         6/95 – 5/99

 

Senior Member of the Technical Staff,                                                                          1/97 – 5/99 

Network Security Dept., GTE Labs, Waltham MA.

System design, evaluation, implementation and integration; consulting in network and systems security; research in security and cryptography. Worked in PKI deployment, biometric systems evaluations, secure email rollout, payment protocol designs.

- Designed a secure method for over-the-air activation and authentication of cellular phones (Copyright IEEE), entailing minimal user interaction.

 

Cryptography Consultant,                                                                                              6/95 - 12/96

Secure Systems Dept., GTE Labs, Waltham MA.

Consulting in encryption, authentication/authorization and digital signature systems.

 

Northeastern University, Boston MA.                                                                            9/92 - 6/95

Research and Teaching Assistant, Computer Science Department.

Research in electronic cash and investigation of applications in cellular services (including cellular phones), internet payment protocols, CDPD and ITS.
- Lectures in Computer Networks, Operating Systems, Fortran, computer applications.

- Network Simulator experience.

- Implemented a Virtual Token Ring (token bus) over a TCP/IP Ethernet network of SUN/SPARC and DEC ULTRA workstations, using C over UNIX.

 

Systems Experience

O.S.:                Cisco IOS, UNIX (Solaris 2.6, 2.7), Win95/98/NT/2000, DOS, Unix scripting.

H/W:                PiX Firewall, Cisco LD, Cisco cat 5000, Sun Enterprise Servers, SonicWall firewalls.

Crypto:             nCipher Hardware cryptographic devices. RSA SecurID, PGP, S/Mime, SSL servers & SSL acceleration.

S/W:                NES, Jrun, Oracle 8/8i, Tuxedo, Jolt, Vignette Story Server, Orca, Axent (now Symantec) IDS.

S/W Eng:          Requirements management: Rational RequisitePro.

Project management and development: Rational Unified Process.

Source Control: Rational ClearCase, RCS.

Languages:       C, SQL, Java, Pascal, Lisp, Fortran, Basic, HTML.

24x7:                Scalable n-tiered architectures with variable components: Java, C/C++, PL/SQL.

Sun Cluster (2.2), Oracle Parallel Server, Veritas VxFS and VM, Load balancing (both H/W and S/W).

Web:                128 bit Server certificates, NES, remote and local monitoring, data & traffic analysis, real-time & historical hardware & software monitoring.

 

Education

 

Ph.D. in Computer Science, 1997

Northeastern University, Boston, MA.

Area:                Cryptography

Thesis:             "Efficient Electronic Cash: New Notions and Techniques"

Minor area:     Computer Networks

 

Master's of Science in Computer Science, 1992

Northeastern University, Boston, MA.

Concentration in Computer and Communication Networks

 

Bachelor's in Mathematics, 1990

National University of Athens, Greece.

Concentration in Applied Mathematics 

References          Available upon request.

 

___________________________________________________________________

Invited Lectures and Presentations

 

10/17/00   Verizon Laboratories, Waltham, MA.

                                “The InternetCash Payment Protocol”

10/16/00   Northeastern University ACM Chapter, Boston, MA.
“Electronic Cash – What it is, How does it work?”

5/2/00       Digital Commerce Society of Boston, Boston, MA, @ the Downtown Harvard Club of Boston.

                                “Prepaid internet cash cards: The InternetCash Experience”

6/18/98     Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris, France.

                                "On secure and efficient encryption".

5/15/98     Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA.

"Easy come-easy go divisible cash".

4/17/98     Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies, Inc., Murray Hill, NJ.
 "Security proofs for practical encryption schemes".

1/8/98       January '97 AHAG meeting, New Orleans, LA. Contribution to TIA TR 45 working group.
 "Fast A-Key distribution for cellular phones".

12/12/97   University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, Milwaukee, WI. Presentation and panel discussion. "Balancing Privacy and Accountability".

11/4/97     22nd Conference on Local Area Networks (LCN '97). Presentation and panel discussion. "Anonymity in electronic commerce".

2/13/97     IEEE New England Chapter.

"Micropayments and anonymous electronic cash".

9/27/96     Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA.

                                "Fair off-line electronic cash".

4/12/96     Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, NM.

"Divisibility and escrowing in off-line electronic cash".

 

Courses       "Introduction to Cryptography," Northeastern University, 9/1/98.
Recorded and nationally broadcasted (live) 5-hour introductory course in cryptographic principles, applications and technical issues. Recordings available from "Network Northeastern".

 

 

 

Refereed Publications

 

§            “Exact Analysis of Exact Change,” with B. Patt-Shamir and Y. Frankel.. SIAM Journal of Discrete Mathematics. To appear.

§            "A security framework for Card-Based systems". Financial Cryptography (FC ‘01), Grand Cayman, BWI, February 15-25, 2001.

§             “Internet Cash: The Revolution in Online Payments”. RSA Conference (RSA 2000), San Jose, January 16-20, 2000.

§            “Electronic Payments: where do we go from here?” with M. Jakobsson, D. M’Raihi and M. Yung. Panel presentation, CQRE [Secure] Congress & Exhibition, Duesseldorf, Germany, Nov. 30 - Dec. 2 1999.

§            "Decision oracles are equivalent to Matching oracles," with Helena Handschuh and Moti Yung. Public Key Cryptography conference (PKC '99), Kamakura, Japan, March 1-3, 1999.

§            "Electronic cash: past, present and future," RSA Conference (RSA ’99), January 18-21 '99, San Jose, CA.

§            "Fair Off-Line e-Cash made easy", with Y. Frankel and M. Yung. Asiacrypt '98, Beijing, China, October 18-22 '98. Lecture Notes in Computer Science.

§            "Easy come-easy go divisible cash", with A. Chan and Y. Frankel. Eurocrypt '98, Helsinki, Finland, May 31-June 4 '98, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 1403.

§            "Efficient key distribution for slow computing devices: Achieving fast over-the-air activation for wireless systems," with Chris Carroll and Yair Frankel. IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland '98), May 3-6 '98, Oakland, CA.
Contributed to the AHAG working group of the TIA TR.45.5 committee for over-the-air activation of cellular phones (OTASP).

§            "On the security of ElGamal-based encryption", with M. Yung. International Workshop on Practice and Theory in Public-Key Cryptography (PKC '98), Yokohama, Japan, Feb. 5-6, '98.

§            "Exact analysis of exact change", with Y. Frankel, and B. Patt-Shamir. 5th Israeli Symposium on the Theory of Computing and Systems (ISTCS '97), Ramat-Gan, Israel, June 17-19 '97.

§            "Anonymity Control in E-Cash Systems", with G. Davida, Y. Frankel and M. Yung. Financial Cryptography '97. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 1318. Anguilla, British West Indies, February 24-27 '97.

§            "Indirect discourse proofs: achieving fair off-line e-cash", with Y. Frankel and M. Yung. Asiacrypt '96. Lecture notes in Computer Science 1163. November 3-7 '96, Kyongju, S. Korea.

§            "Mis-representation of identities in e-cash schemes and how to prevent it", with A. Chan, Y. Frankel and P. MacKenzie. Asiacrypt '96, Lecture notes in Computer Science 1163. November 3-7 '96, Kyongju, S. Korea.     

 

Selected Research and Technical Reports

 

§         "An efficient off-line electronic cash scheme as secure as RSA", with A. Chan and Y. Frankel. Technical Report NU-CCS-96-03, Northeastern University. 

§         "How to break and repair e-cash protocols based on the representation problem", with A. Chan and Y. Frankel. Technical Report NU-CCS-96-05, Northeastern University.

§         "The semantic security of ElGamal encryption is equivalent to the decision Diffie-Hellman problem", with M. Yung. Research Report, GTE Laboratories.

§         "Assessment of Intrusion Detection Technology," with H-P. Ko and S. Samorodin. Technical Report, GTE Laboratories.

§         "Survey of Biometric Technologies". Technical Report, GTE Laboratories.

§         "Survey of Current Encryption Products". Technical Report, GTE Laboratories.

 

Membership           International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR), IEEE, IEEE Standards Association (IEEE-SA), P1363 Ballot Group.

General      Fluent in Greek, intermediate knowledge of French.
Interests: Motor sports, music, photography.