David Balbás

¡Hola! I am David Balbás, a PhD student in Cryptography at IMDEA Software Institute in Madrid (Spain) since October 2021. I am advised by Dario Fiore and co-advised by Maribel González-Vasco and Claudio Soriente.

I obtained a MSc in Computer Science at KTH Royal Institute of Technology (Sweden), and did my MSc Thesis at LASEC, EPFL (Switzerland). Before, I studied Mathematics and Physics at University of Cantabria (Spain) and worked as a Cryptography Engineer at BERTEN.

Update: in autumn 2024, I am visiting NTT Social Informatics Laboratories (Japan) hosted by Masayuki Abe.

Interests

I work on the design and analysis of cryptographic primitives and protocols, as well as on their applications. More broadly, I am interested in theory and practice of cryptography, computer security, privacy and complexity theory.

My research is centered around the following topics. Don't hesitate to reach out if you are interested!

  • Succinct cryptographic primitives
  • Verifiable computation, proof systems, and zero-knowledge proofs
  • Public-key cryptography with advanced functionalities
  • End-to-end encryption in real-world protocols

Publications

Preprints
2024
2023
2022

Theses and Academic Projects

Teaching and Service

  • I am partially funded by an FPU Grant by "Ministerio de Universidades" of the Government of Spain.
  • I have been a Teaching Assistant in the courses:
    • Programming II, BSc in Mathematics and Computer Science, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. 2023, 2024.
    • Algorithms and Data Structures, BSc in Data Science, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. 2023, 2024.
    • Algorithms and Data Structures, BSc in Computer Science, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. 2023.
    • Computer Security, MSc in Computer Science, KTH Royal Institute of Technology. 2020.
  • I am or have been part of the Program Committee for the conferences:
  • I have reviewed scientific papers for the conferences:
    • CRYPTO '22, '23, '24
    • EUROCRYPT '23, '24, '25
    • ACM CCS '24
    • ASIACRYPT '24
    • TCC '24
    • PKC '25

Contact Me

  • My email address is: david (dot) balbas (at) imdea.org
  • LinkedIn profile
  • My CV is available upon request.