Ivan Damgård

Timeline

1. 1983–1988

   Mathematics and a PhD at Aarhus

   He earns a master's degree in mathematics at Aarhus University in 1983, with minors in music and computer science. After a stay as guest researcher at CWI in Amsterdam in 1987, he completes his Aarhus PhD in May 1988, advised by Peter Landrock.

2. 1988–1989

   Multiparty protocols and hashing

   In 1988, he writes “Multiparty unconditionally secure protocols” with David Chaum and Claude Crépeau, an article on multiparty computation. In 1989, he publishes “A Design Principle for Hash Functions”, which describes the Merkle–Damgård construction he found independently of Ralph Merkle and which is used in hash functions such as SHA-2, SHA-1 and MD5.

3. 2005–2008

   Professor at Aarhus

   In 2005, he becomes a professor of computer science at Aarhus University and builds its cryptography group, one of the strongest in Europe by 2016. In 2008, Aarhus University helps develop a digital auction house for Danish farmers on multiparty computation, where bidders submit bids without revealing them to one another.

4. 2010

   Fellow of the IACR

   The International Association for Cryptologic Research names him an IACR Fellow in 2010, for fundamental contributions to cryptography, sustained educational leadership in cryptography, and service to the IACR.

5. 2014–2015

   An ERC grant and an MPC book

   In 2014, he receives an ERC Advanced Grant. Cambridge University Press publishes Secure Multiparty Computation and Secret Sharing in July 2015, which he writes with Ronald Cramer and Jesper Buus Nielsen as the first book on information-theoretically secure multiparty computation. In this field, parties who do not trust each other compute together on data that each keeps secret.

6. 2018

   A Villum Kann Rasmussen award

   In 2018, he receives the Villum Kann Rasmussen Annual Award in Science and Technology, worth 5 million DKK, for his research in cryptography and data security. He explains that multiparty computation lets a network of computers work together as a single computer that keeps data secure even if one or more of its computers is hacked.

7. 2019–2026

   Private machine learning and DNA screening

   In 2019, he coauthors “New Primitives for Actively-Secure MPC over Rings with Applications to Private Machine Learning” at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, benchmarking oblivious decision tree and support vector machine evaluation. Open Philanthropy gives him and Carsten Baum USD 474,000 in 2020 to build a DNA synthesis screening system as part of the SecureDNA project, with MIT Media Lab, Tsinghua University, Northeastern University and the Weizmann Institute of Science. In July 2026, he is an author of “A system capable of verifiably and privately screening global DNA synthesis” in National Science Review.

8. As of October 2026

   Aarhus professor and company co-founder

   He is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at Aarhus University, where he founded the Section on Cryptography and Cyber Security, a research group of around 27 staff members. He is a co-founder of Cryptomathic, Partisia and Sepior.