Associate Professor Ryan Ko is Head of the Cyber Security Researchers of Waikato (CROW) and Director of the NZ Institute for Security and Crime Science at the University of Waikato. With CROW, he established NZ's first cyber security lab and graduate research programme in 2012 and 2013 respectively. He is principal investigator of MBIE-funded (NZ$12.23million) STRATUS project.
Ko co-established the NZ Cyber Security Challenge since 2014. His research focuses on returning data control to users, and challenges in cloud computing security and privacy, data provenance, and homomorphic encryption. He is also interested in attribution and vulnerability detection, focusing on ransomware propagation.
With more than 50 publications including 3 international patents, he serves on 6 journal editorial boards, and as series editor for Elsevier's security books. He also serves as the editor of ISO/IEC 21878 – Security guidelines in design and implementation of virtualized servers.
A Fellow of Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), he is a co-creator of the (ISC)2 CCSP certification - the gold-standard international cloud security professional certification. Prior to academia, he was a HP Labs lead computer scientist leading innovations in HP global security products. He is technical adviser for the Ministry of Justice's Harmful Digital Communications Act, NZ Minister of Communications’ Cyber Skills Taskforce, LIC, CSA and the INTERPOL.
He holds a Bachelor of Engineering (Hons) in Computer Engineering and PhD. from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.