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.
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YIANNIS TSIOUNIS, Ph.D.
- 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.:
H/W:
Crypto:
S/W:
S/W Eng:
Languages:
24x7:
Web:
Cisco IOS, UNIX (Solaris 2.6, 2.7), Win95/98/NT/2000, DOS, Unix scripting.
PiX Firewall, Cisco LD, Cisco cat 5000, Sun Enterprise Servers, SonicWall
firewalls.
nCipher Hardware cryptographic devices. RSA SecurID, PGP, S/Mime, SSL
servers & SSL acceleration.
NES, Jrun, Oracle 8/8i, Tuxedo, Jolt, Vignette Story Server, Orca, Axent (now
Symantec) IDS.
Requirements management: Rational RequisitePro.
Project management and development: Rational Unified Process.
Source Control: Rational ClearCase, RCS.
C, SQL, Java, Pascal, Lisp, Fortran, Basic, HTML.
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).
128 bit Server certificates, NES, remote and local monitoring, data & traffic
analysis, real-time & historical hardware & software monitoring.
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YIANNIS TSIOUNIS, Ph.D.
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".
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YIANNIS TSIOUNIS, Ph.D.
REFEREED PUBLICATIONS
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“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
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"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.
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