About

Aisling Connolly is a cryptographer and Chief Strategy Officer at TACEO, where she leads work on privacy infrastructure for blockchains, what the team calls privacy on any rail. She holds a PhD in cryptography from École Normale Supérieure (ENS Paris), and previously held research roles at DFINITY and Worldline/Ingenico.

Long bio

Aisling is based in Lugano and works at the intersection of applied cryptography and production systems. As CSO at TACEO, she helps direct work on privacy infrastructure that integrates with existing blockchains, already in production with World and ZKPassport, supporting proof-of-human verification for roughly eighteen million people. Before TACEO she was a Senior Research Scientist at DFINITY, and before that spent six years on applied cryptography research at Worldline/Ingenico, with a stint as a visiting researcher at UC San Diego. She earned her PhD in cryptography at École Normale Supérieure in Paris, and was a Google Women Techmakers Scholar.

Career

• Aug 2024 to present TACEO · Chief Strategy Officer
• 2021 to 2024 DFINITY · Senior Research Scientist
• 2015 to 2021 Worldline / Ingenico · Applied cryptography research
• 2020 UC San Diego · Visiting researcher
• 2015 to 2019 École Normale Supérieure (ENS Paris) · PhD, Cryptography

Areas of Expertise

• Applied cryptography
• Privacy-enhancing technologies
• Anonymous credentials
• Post-quantum cryptography
• Private computation infrastructure
• The intersection of institutional finance and onchain rails

Select Publications

Full list on Google Scholar.

• Connolly, Lafourcade, Perez Kempner. "Improved Constructions of Anonymous Credentials from Structure-Preserving Signatures on Equivalence Classes." PKC, 2022.
• Connolly, Deschamps, Lafourcade, Perez Kempner. "Protego: Efficient, Revocable and Auditable Anonymous Credentials with Applications to Hyperledger Fabric." Indocrypt, 2022.
• Cerulli, Connolly, Neven, Preiss, Shoup. "vetKeys: How a Blockchain Can Keep Many Secrets." IACR ePrint, 2023.
• Beunardeau, Connolly, Géraud, Naccache. "On the Hardness of the Mersenne Low Hamming Ratio Assumption." LATINCRYPT, 2017.
• Connolly, Farshim, Fuchsbauer. "Security of Symmetric Primitives Against Key-Correlated Attacks." IACR Transactions on Symmetric Cryptology (ToSC), 2019.
• Connolly. "Freedom of Encryption." IEEE Security & Privacy, 16(1), 2018.

PhD dissertation: Try Again. Fail Again. Fail Better. New Notions of Security, Broken Assumptions, and Increased Efficiency in Cryptography. PSL / ENS Paris, 2019.