Carlos Cid was awarded his PhD in Mathematics (in the area of combinatorial group theory) in 1999 at the Universidade de Brasília, Brazil. He moved to Europe in early 2000, to take on a post-doctoral researcher position at RWTH-Aachen, Germany. In Aachen he worked on applications of symbolic computation methods for solving systems of partial differential equations. In 2001 Carlos joined a network security startup in Dublin, Ireland, as a software engineer, where he stayed for 2.5 years.
His background and experience eventually led him to work in the area of security and cryptography. Carlos spent almost two decades in the Information Security Group at Royal Holloway University of London: he joined in 2003 as a post-doctoral researcher, and left in February 2022 as a full professor. He was the founding director of Royal Holloway’s Centre for Doctoral Training in Cyber Security, and held several teaching, research and administrative roles during his time at the university.
In May 2022 he became the director of Simula UiB, a small independent research institute in cryptography and information theory in Bergen, Norway. Since April 2022 he is also an adjunct professor at OIST, where he leads the Applied Cryptography Unit.
Carlos is an experienced researcher and educator in cyber security. As a mathematician and cryptographer, his research has traditionally focused on applying algebraic techniques to symmetric- and public-key cryptanalysis. More recently he has also been working on quantum/post-quantum cryptography and secure computation. Finally, he has also an interest in applications of economics to cyber security, eg applying game-theoretic techniques to study cyber security problems.
Carlos is part of the submission team of Classic McEliece (following its merge with NTS-KEM), a code-based cryptographic scheme selected as a 4th-round finalist to NIST’s Post-Quantum Cryptography Standardization Project. He previously served in the selection committees of the CAESAR and eSTREAM cryptographic competitions, and was the general and programme co-chair of FSE 2014, held in London, and SAC 2018 in Calgary. He is a co-author of the book “Algebraic Aspects of the Advanced Encryption Standard”.
