Stafford Tavares

Stafford E. Tavares is a cryptographer who teaches at Queens University in Canada. His specialty is block cipher design and analysis; he has published extensively in that area.

Tavares was Carlisle Adams' PhD thesis supervisor in the work that led to the CAST family of block ciphers.

Tavares was one of the proposers of the strict avalanche criterion. This is a strong version of the requirement for good avalanche properties. Complementing any single bit of the input or the key should give exactly a 50% chance of a change in any given bit of output.