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, Prof. Emmanuela Orsini, and Svetla Nikova. Previous editions:
- 2025 - Bocconi Secure Computation Day
- 2025 - Stanford Hardware Acceleration Summit
- 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 hosted these companies in our COED events:
- Google, Intel, AWS, Microsoft, Sony, AMD, Bosch, Nokia, Eurostat, Ingonyama, imec, Optalysys, Fabric Cryptography, Zama, Belfort, Niobium Microsystems, Cybernetica, Roseman Labs, LatticaAI, STMicroelectronics, Cornami, Duality Technologies, Monadic DNA, 0xPARC, CipherSonic Labs, Sunscreen, Royal Society London, CiTip, and Kioxia.
Program committee:
- IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (EuroS&P): 2026
- IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency (ICBC): 2024, 2025, 2026
- FHE.org: 2026
- Lightsec: 2025
- IEEE International Conference on Blockchain Computing and Applications (BCCA): 2025
- IEEE TDSC Journal: 2025
- IEEE Transactions on Computers: 2025
- Transactions on Emerging Telecommunications Technologies: 2019
- Subreviewer: Eurocrypt, crypto, Middleware, Eurosys
- Artifact Evaluation Program Committee: EuroSys’21, SOSP’19
- Track chair at “the third winter school on information security and cryptology (ISCwsISC)” 2023
Supervision of researchers and students:
PhD students:
PhD Advisory committee:
PhD Interns (Bell Labs):
- Leonard Schild
- Martin Zbudila
- Aikata
- Bhavish Raj Gopal
- Robin Geelen
- Barry Van Leeuwen
- Claudia Bartoli
- Marc Rivinus
- Erik Pohle
- Mariana Gama
Master’s thesis:
- Javier Lopez
- Jonas Beirinckx
- Hua Xu
- Pritam Pak
- Robin Lefever
- Jesse Geens
- Bo Kleynen
- Jonathan Du
- Pieter-Jan Vrielynck
- Arno Van Langendonck
- Jordy Dieltjes
- Stef Verreydt
- Matthijs Kaminski
My past: 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.
News?
- Paper - Our paper on “Blind zkSNARKs for Private Proof Delegation and Verifiable Computation over Encrypted Data” (paper) is published at IACR CiC.
- Paper - Our paper on “Distributed Proof Generation of FRI-based SNARKs” (paper) is almost accepted at IACR CiC.
- Papers - We have two papers out on Anonymous Credentials (paper1, paper2)
- Just wrapped up our Stanford and Bocconi Secure Computation Day.
- Talk - I just gave a talk at RWC 2025 (video, slides)
- Talk - Invited talk at Cambridge University’s security seminars by Alastair Beresford (video)
- Talk - Gave two talks on ZK at COSIC Course and Privacy Tech course (video1, video2)
- Paper - 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.
- Our recent paper on “Robust Byzantine Fault Tolerance for Client-centric Mobile Web Applications” has been published in (IEEE TPDS 2023)