Jacques FOURNIER
Security Expert -GEMALTO

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Working in security requires a strong theoretical background for sure, something that can be successfully acquired in anywhere". But successful careers are built on experience and professional know-how
Jacques FOURNIER gives a guest lecture to the Masters students on security and asynchronous circuits.
He has been working in security in one of the most leading company in the security field, Gemalto (formerly Gemplus) for over seven years now. Gemalto is the world leader in smart-cards and smart-card-based solutions: bank cards, SIM cards, identity cards, electronic passports, secure tokens, contactless cards… He has been working on several security issues ranging from hardware cryptographic accelerators, secure embedded cryptographic software to secure architectures for advanced token-based identification schemes. He has also contributed to several publicly funded projects one of which being G3Card. His main areas of interest are secure hardware architectures, asynchronous circuits and embedded vector processors. Prior to joining Gemalto, he graduated from the Ecole Supérieure d'Electicité (SUPELEC), did a Masters degree at Georgia Tech and a PhD at the University of Cambridge.
Working in security requires a strong theoretical background for sure, something that can be successfully acquired in anywhere. But successful careers are built on experience and professional know-how. This Masters in Security does have a serious advantage with respect to the latter point since its students inherit from the considerable experience of the top notch security companies gathered in the Provence region.
Even if security is a lot about experience and (often) learning the hard way what works and what doesn’t, theoretical concepts that are taught are above all mandatory pre-requisites. So my advice would be to make sure that the basics are fully mastered.
For Jacques the main competences required to follow this program are to have a strong theoretical background, to be “security minded”, i.e. to have at the same time a hacker’s mind and a defender’s mind and to be curious and up-to-date with the latest attacks and solutions.