David Derler

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Hi, my name is David. Thanks a lot for stopping by. I am a cryptographer, engineer, and engineering leader with about 15 years of experience in theory and practice of cryptography and distributed systems. Since May 2026, I have been on a sabbatical. Before that, I worked in various roles at the DFINITY Foundation, most recently as Senior Engineering Manager, where I helped to design, build, and scale the Internet Computer — from scratch. Before joining DFINITY in 2018, I was a researcher in the crypto group at ISEC (formerly IAIK), Graz University of Technology, where I also obtained my PhD (Dr.techn.) in computer science with distinction in 2017.

My research interests are in provably secure public-key cryptography, with a focus on addressing security and privacy issues in modern computing scenarios such as cloud computing or blockchains, and on bringing cutting-edge cryptographic schemes and protocols into practice. This also includes primitives believed to remain secure against attacks by sufficiently powerful quantum computers.

I am a co-designer of the Picnic family of post-quantum digital signature schemes, which made it to the final round of NIST's initial post-quantum crypto standardization project as an alternate candidate.

I have published many papers at leading venues in cryptography and security. Below you can find a list of selected publications. For a full list, refer to the publications page or to Google Scholar.