David Butler

David Butler

Postdoc at the Alan Turing Institute

About

I am now a Postdoc at The Alan Turing Institute working on developing trustworthy ID systems under Professor Jon Crowcroft. My current work focusses on using Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETS) to ensure the security and privacy of digital identity systems. I completed my PhD at the University of Edinburgh, affiliated with the Alan Turing Institute, in June 2020. I was supervised by David Aspinall and Adria Gascon.

My PhD research was at the intersection of cryptography and formal methods. In particular I was interested in computer aided security proofs. I worked on providing machine checked proofs for proofs of security of low level primitives and Multi Party Computation (MPC) protocols. Have a look at my formalisation of MPC here and my formalisation of Sigma protocols and Commitment Schemes here. I am still interested, and continue to work, in formal methoods I have sincce turned my attention to applying what I have learned at this foundational level to real world applications; digital ID systems for developing economies and trying to increase their trustworthiness by enchancing their security and privacy.

Before the Alan Turing Institute I completed my masters (First Class Honours, MMath) at Durham University.

For more details on my research, see my publications page or my google scholar profile, or feel free to contact me directly.

In 2018 I spent time working at the NASA Ames Research Center in California. You can read about what I got up to here.

News from 2020

  • Our paper on differentially private health tokens for COVID-19 has been accepted to the NDSS CoronaDef workshop.

  • Our journal paper has been accepted to the Journal of Automated Reasoning.

  • We have a new paper presenting ‘SecureABC’, our privacy preserving solution to antibody certificates for COVID-19. This work was also featured in a blog post by the Alan Turing Institute. We were also invited to talk about this work in the Tuing’s podcast series.

  • We had our paper accepted to the ZKproofs workshop in London in April.

  • We had our paper accepted at CPP 2020.