Welcoming David Núñez, PhD
We’re delighted to announce that David Núñez, PhD, one of the most prolific proxy re-encryption researchers in the world and the author of papers such as NTRUReEncrypt, BlindIdM, and New Security Definitions is joining NuCypher fulltime. David has long been a close collaborator, most recently playing a key role in designing Umbral, our underlying cryptosystem.
We first met David in early 2016, while Michael and I were building ZeroDB, an end-to-end encrypted database, that would later become NuCypher. One of the features of ZeroDB, was the ability to allow other third-parties to query your encrypted data without sharing your private key. This was when we first discovered proxy re-encryption as the mechanism to do this — stumbling upon an excellent proxy re-encryption library written in Python.
A few months later we got an email from the author of that library (David!) — asking about what we were working on.
An email thread turned into a series of calls, which turned into a trip to Malaga, Spain, where David was working as a post-doc researcher at NICS Lab under Professor Isaac Agudo.
Over the course of our collaboration, we covered everything from creating an ECIES-compatible version of PRE, implementing PRE in Hadoop and Kafka, designing and implementing Umbral, and building NuCypher KMS. Our appreciation for David’s talent and thoughtfulness when designing real-world cryptosystems has only grown since that original email.
David joining our team full time has been a long time coming and we couldn’t be more excited. We hope you will all join us in giving him a big welcome!
