Born in Schaffhausen, Switzerland, he received a Dipl. Math. ETH, followed by a PhD in Computer Science from ETH Zurich under the supervision of Professor Ueli Maurer. After a postdoc at McGill University, Montreal, he was Assistant Professor at University of Waterloo, Ontario, and Université de Montréal, Quebec. From 2005 to 2011, he was an SNF Professor for Quantum Information at ETH Zürich.His research domain lies in the fields of cryptography, information theory, and quantum information processing. In particular, he is interested in an efficient realization of provably secure cryptographic and other information-processing functionalities based on weak classical or quantum-physical primitives.