Brief Biography

Koç is the co-founder of the Workshop on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems (CHES: chesworkshop.org) with Christof Paar, which started in 1999. The CHES Workshop is the second largest cryptography conference after Crypto and the premier forum for presenting scientific advances in all aspects of cryptographic hardware and security of embedded systems. About 300 engineers and scientists from over 30 countries participate in CHES, submitting nearly 150 papers every year, with acceptance rate less than 20%. Koç was the program co-chair and proceedings editor of the CHES Workshop in 1999-2003. Koç has been a permanent member of the CHES steering committee, in addition to serving as the publicity chair, the general chair, and the program committee member since 1999. He is now the chair of the CHES steering committee. In 2010, Crypto and CHES conferences were the first time held together at University of California Santa Barbara; Koç and J.-J. Quisquater were the general chairs of the CHES Workshop.

Recently, Koç has also collaborated with a group of European mathematicians and engineers and co-founded a new conference, International Workshop on the Arithmetic of Finite Fields (WAIFI: waifi.org). It is a forum of engineers and mathematicians interested in efficient software and hardware realizations of finite fields. The first and second WAIFIs were held in Madrid (2007) and Siena (2008); The third WAIFI was in Istanbul in June 2010. In addition to serving as a member of the steering committee, Koç was the program co-chair of WAIFI 2008 and the general co-chair of WAIFI 2010.

Koç has also been in the editorial boards of IEEE Transactions on Computers (2003-2008) and IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing (2003-2007). Furthermore, he was a guest co-editor of two issues (April 2003 & November 2008) of IEEE Transactions on Computers on cryptographic and cryptanalytic hardware and embedded systems.

Koç is the founding Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Cryptographic Engineering, a new Springer journal, covering research areas of the CHES Workshop; the first issue the journal was published in March 2011.

Koç was elected as IEEE Fellow in 2007 for his contributions to cryptographic engineering.

Koç is the co-author of the book Cryptographic Algorithms on Reconfigurable Hardware, published by Springer in 2007, and the editor and co-author of the book Cryptographic Engineering, also published by Springer in 2009. In addition to contributing to 6 conference proceedings as co-editor, he has also authored or co-authored more than 120 journal and conference papers, and 9 US patents and 3 applications.

Koç graduated 14 Ph.D. students and 33 M.S. students, and also directed the theses of 4 honors students. 9 of his Ph.D. students are currently professors (2 in the US, 1 in Mexico, and 6 in other countries), the remaining work for global high-tech companies, e.g., Microsoft, AMD, and Samsung.

Currently, Koç is a professor at Istanbul Şehir University. He is also an adjunct professor in the Department of Computer Science and the College of Creative Studies at University of California Santa Barbara. He is managing two technology companies in Santa Barbara, which he co-founded. These companies, CryptoCode and Claveo Software, are developing cryptography and security products and services for mobile and embedded systems.