About me

I am a cryptography research scientist at Bell Labs and a Postdoc at COSIC (KU Leuven) (advised by Prof. Nigel Smart). Previously, I worked as a PostDoc at imec-DistriNet (advised by Prof. Wouter Joosen) where I also completed my PhD in 2021.

Research interests (more here):

• Computing on encrypted data: Secure multiparty computation (MPC) & Homomorphic encryption (HE)
• Security and privacy for streaming, storages and data sharing systems: Zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP) & Encrypted search
• Middleware and software architecture: adaptation, reflection and data security
• [previously] Cloud computing infrastructure: capacity planning, container orchestration frameworks

COED Industry Days: I am a co-organizer of computing-on-encrypted-data industry days. Other co-organizers are Prof. Nigel Smart, Prof. Ingrid Verbauwhede, Svetla Nikova, and Emmanuela Orsini. Previous editions:

• 2024 - Leuven Hardware Acceleration Summit for FHE+ZKP
• 2023 - Legal, policy and government applications
• 2022 - Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE)
• 2021 - Secure Multiparty Computation (MPC) (code: COED4321)

I received a Ph.D. from KU Leuven (Belgium, 2021), a Master’s degree in distributed systems and computer networks from the University of Antwerp (Belgium, 2014), and a Bachelor’s degree in computer hardware engineering from the University of Isfahan (Iran, 2010).

Previously, I was a research associate at the imec-DistriNet research group, KU Leuven. Before joining imec-DistriNet, I worked on cloud computing subjects in Alcatel-Lucent (now Nokia) as part of my Master’s thesis research. Furthermore, I worked for a number of years in the software industry as a software engineer in the Brussels region.

The latest news and what am I doing now?

• Currently, our Leuven COED Summit speaker line-up includes Intel, Google, Niobium Microsystems, COSIC, Ingonyama, Optalysys and Fabric Cryptography.
• I will be attending Real-World Crypto (RWC ‘24).
• Our recent paper on “MPC With Delayed Parties Over Star-Like Networks” has been accepted at Asiacrypt, one of the IACR flagship conferences.
• I hosted Sylvain Chatel from EPFL at Bell Labs in 2023, and together, we initiated the applied FHE research in the lab.
• I hosted two PhD interns at Bell Labs in 2023: (1) Mariana Gama, and (2) Erik Pohle, and together we advanced the MPC research in the lab.
• Our recent paper on “Robust Byzantine Fault Tolerance for Client-centric Mobile Web Applications” has been published in (IEEE TPDS 2023)