Birgit Pfitzmann is a senior research staff member of IBM Research at the Zurich Research Lab. She is currently responsible for research in risk and compliance. Birgit Pfitzmann joined IBM in 2001. Since then she contributed to several research projects in risk and compliance, identity management, web services security, privacy, and formal verification of cryptographic protocols, served on various taskforces on defining IBM's technology and strategy in security and privacy, and worked closely with IBM's product and services divisions on bringing these technologies to market.
Before joining IBM, she was a tenured professor and dean of the Department for Computer Science at the University of Saarland in Saarbrücken, one of the top ranked CS departments in Germany. In Saarbrücken she and former students started Sirrix AG, a spin-off company specializing on information security (she is no longer associated with Sirrix). Birgit Pfitzmann (co-)authored more than 100 research papers in security, privacy and cryptography, and served on the program committees of several international conferences on these topics. She was the program chair of Eurocrypt 2001 and the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security 2004, and will be the co-program chair of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy 2006 and 2007, which are three of the most prestigious international research conferences on these topics.
Her scientific accomplishments include the development of cryptographic primitives with novel security properties, most notably fail-stop signatures and asymmetric fingerprinting, and the cryptanalysis of cryptographic protocols. She made significant contributions to the area of applying formal methods to the verification of cryptographic protocols, and is currently one of the leading researchers in the field of modelling and verifying cryptographic systems. At IBM she developed protocols for federated identity management with novel security and privacy properties.
She received a Diploma in Computer Science from the University of Karlsruhe, and a Doctorate from the University of Hildesheim, both in Germany.
She is Member of the IACR, where she served on the Board of Directors, and of the ACM and GI, and Senior Member of the IEEE.