Markku-Juhani Saarinen

Dr. Saarinen is a Staff Cryptography Architect at PQShield Ltd. (Oxford, UK) and a Professor of Practice (työelämäprofessori) at Tampere University (Finland). He started his career as a cryptographer at SSH Communications Security in 1997, helping to create the now-ubiquitous SSH2 protocol. Markku has stayed with cryptography and technical information security since then, dividing time between academia and the security industry. He was the first employee of PQShield when the company started as a University of Oxford spin-out in 2018. At PQShield, he has architected some of the first commercially successful high-assurance Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) hardware modules. Markku contributes regularly to the NIST PQC Standardization Effort and is active in RISC-V Cryptography standardization.