Academic Staff

Dr Man Ho Allen Au received his BEng and MPhil degrees from the Department of Information Engineering of the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2003 and 2005 respectively. He then obtained his PhD from the School of Computer Science and Software Engineering of the University of Wollongong in 2009. Formerly, he was an associate professor at the Department of Computer Science, The University of Hong Kong. His research interests include information security, applied cryptography, blockchain technology, and their applications. Dr Au has published over 190 refereed papers in top journals and conferences, including CRYPTO, ASIACRYPT, IEEE S&P, ACM CCS, ACM SIGMOD, SOSP, NDSS, IEEE TIFS, TC, TKDE, etc. He has been ranked as HKU Scholar in the Top 1% (by Clarivate Analytics in the top 1% worldwide by citations) in 2020,21,22. He is a recipient of the 2009 PET runner-up award for outstanding research in privacy enhancing technologies.

Dr Au’s research has generated significant social and economic impact. In the past 5 years, he has, as the principal investigator, attracted over 30 million HKD in research and high-level consultancy projects. His digital signature technology has been adopted by the Hyperledger Fabric project, the most popular blockchain infrastructure supported by big industry players like IBM, Intel and SAP. Dr Au is an expert member of the China delegation of ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 27 working group 2 - Cryptography and security mechanisms and a committee member of the Hong Kong Blockchain Society R&D division.