Jennifer Roma Seberry (also published as Jennifer Seberry Wallis; born 13 February 1944 in Sydney) is an Australian

cryptographer Cryptography, or cryptology (from "hidden, secret"; and ''graphein'', "to write", or '' -logia'', "study", respectively), is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of adversarial behavior. More gen ...

, mathematician, and

computer scientist A computer scientist is a scientist who specializes in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation. Although computer scientists can also focus their work and research on ...

, currently a professor at the

University of Wollongong The University of Wollongong (UOW) is an Australian public university, public research university located in the coastal city of Wollongong, New South Wales, approximately south of Sydney. , the university had an enrolment of more than 33,000 s ...

, Australia. She was formerly the head of the Department of Computer Science and director of the Centre for Computer Security Research at the university.

Education and career

Seberry attended

Parramatta High School Parramatta High School (abbreviated as PHS and colloquially known as Parra High) is a Education in Australia#Government schools, government-funded Mixed-sex education, co-educational dual modality partially Selective school (New South Wales), ac ...

and got her BSc at

University of New South Wales The University of New South Wales (UNSW) is a public research university based in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. It was established in 1949. The university comprises seven faculties, through which it offers bachelor's, master's and docto ...

, 1966; MSc at

La Trobe University La Trobe University is a public university, public research university based in Melbourne, Victoria (Australia), Victoria, Australia. Its main campus is located in the suburb of Bundoora, Victoria, Bundoora. The university was established in 1 ...

, 1969; PhD at

, 1971 (Computational Mathematics); B.Ec. with two years completed at

University of Sydney The University of Sydney (USYD) is a public university, public research university in Sydney, Australia. Founded in 1850, it is the oldest university in both Australia and Oceania. One of Australia's six sandstone universities, it was one of the ...

. Her

doctoral advisor A doctoral advisor (also dissertation director, dissertation advisor; or doctoral supervisor) is a member of a university faculty whose role is to guide graduate students who are candidates for a doctorate, helping them select coursework, as well ...

was Bertram Mond. Seberry was the first person to teach cryptology at an Australian University (

). She was also the first woman Professor of Computer Science in Australia. She was the first woman Reader in Combinatorial Mathematics in Australia. she had supervised 30 doctorates and had 71 academic descendants. Her notable students have included Peter Eades, Mirka Miller, and Deborah Street.

Service

Seberry was a founding member of the University of Sydney's Research Foundation for Information Technology Information Security Group in 1987. The group grew into the Australian Information Security Association, an Australian representative industry body with over 1000 paid members and branches in most capitals. Seberry was one of the founders of the Asiacrypt international conference in 1990 (then called Auscrypt).

Research

Seberry has contributed to the knowledge and use of Hadamard matrices and

bent function In the mathematical field of combinatorics, a bent function is a Boolean function that is maximally non-linear; it is as different as possible from the set of all linear and affine functions when measured by Hamming distance between truth tables ...

s for network security. She has published numerous papers on mathematics, cryptography, and computer and network security. She led the team that produced the

LOKI Loki is a Æsir, god in Norse mythology. He is the son of Fárbauti (a jötunn) and Laufey (mythology), Laufey (a goddess), and the brother of Helblindi and Býleistr. Loki is married to the goddess Sigyn and they have two sons, Narfi (son of Lo ...

and LOKI97

block cipher In cryptography, a block cipher is a deterministic algorithm that operates on fixed-length groups of bits, called ''blocks''. Block ciphers are the elementary building blocks of many cryptographic protocols. They are ubiquitous in the storage a ...

s and the HAVAL

cryptographic hash function A cryptographic hash function (CHF) is a hash algorithm (a map (mathematics), map of an arbitrary binary string to a binary string with a fixed size of n bits) that has special properties desirable for a cryptography, cryptographic application: ...

s. Seberry is also a co-author of the Py (spelled RU) stream cipher, which was a candidate for the eSTREAM stream cipher project.

References

External links

Jennifer Seberry's page at University of Wollongong
{{DEFAULTSORT:Seberry, Jennifer Australian mathematicians Australian cryptographers Australian women mathematicians Living people Modern cryptographers Computer security academics 1944 births Academic staff of the University of Wollongong International Association for Cryptologic Research fellows People in information technology