About Me

I am a PhD student within the Security Group at the Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge. My supervisor is Dr. Markus Kuhn and my research interests include authentication, payment protocols security (EMV in particular), applied cryptography, hardware security (side-channel analysis in particular) and digital communications.

My research is sponsored by Google and I am a recipient of the Google European Fellowship in Mobile Security. I've been a Google intern in the summer of 2011. In 2009-2010 I have done the MPhil in Advanced Computer Science within the Computer Laboratory, and previous to that I've been working as a research assistant at IRIT in Toulouse (France) with Romulus Grigoras and Vincent Charvillat within the Vortex team.

I am a member of Darwin College, where I was the captain of the football team ( I still join them from time to time). I am also part of the Orthodox society in Cambridge.

I was born in Madrid, Spain and I did my undergraduate at the University "Politehnica" of Bucharest, Romania. During that time I won the Windows Embedded Student Challenge 2006 (now part of Imagine Cup) with my colleagues from Politehnica.


Activity

Check this page for a list of my publications and my projects page to see some of my work.

You can follow me on twitter. You can also find some media bits about my work here.

Students having supervisions with me please go to this page.

I also keep this page with a few tutorials about things I came across.


News

The Rip-off Britain episode on Friday 2nd December talks about the UK payment system and shows some of our work.

The Smart Card Detective is now available from Smart Architects. The project is hosted on smartcarddective.com and the source code on Google Code.

I have presented our paper on peer-to-peer EMV transactions at the Financial Cryptography 2011 conference. The talk is available here.


Talks