Paolo D'ARCO | Curriculum

Paolo D’Arco was born in Salerno (Italy), on July 7, 1972. He received a Master, with honors, in Computer Science in May 1997, and a PhD in Computer Science in February 2002, both from the University of Salerno. During the PhD program, he attended a few schools for PhD students on algorithms and cryptography: he was a visiting researcher for a semester at the University of Waterloo, in Ontario (Canada). He also had two short-term visits at the University of Catalunya (Spain), and at Telcordia Technologies - DIMACS- (USA). From November 2001 to October 2002, he was a post-doctoral fellow at the Centre for Applied Cryptographic Research (CACR), in the Department of Combinatorics and Optimization (University of Waterloo), under the supervision of Professor Douglas Stinson. In the Computer Science department at the University of Salerno, from 2005 to 2015 he was an assistant professor, from 2015 to 2021 an associate professor, and since 2021 he is a full professor in Computer Science.

His main research interests are in cryptography. He has worked on the design and analysis of cryptographic primitives and protocols. A few topics of attention have been secret sharing, key distribution, authentication, anonymous communication, oblivious transfer, private information retrieval, visual cryptography, robust and distributed broadcast, and multicast communication. He has also done some cryptanalysis of lightweight and ultralightweight protocols. Currently, he is interested in secure multi-party computation, blockchain technologies, and post-quantum techniques.

Since 2005 he has joined 59 program committees of international conferences, and he has been a keynote speaker at SecITC (2018), at SecITC (2016), and an invited speaker at Stinson66 (2022), at the Smart University (2007), at the Third Pythagorean Conference on Geometry, Combinatorial Design and Cryptology (2003), and at the Summer Meeting of the Canadian Mathematical Society (CMS) (2002). Since December 2008 he is in the PhD Faculty Board for the PhD program in Computer Science, at the University of Salerno. Since 2004 he has taught classes in algorithms and data structures, operating systems, network and network security, and cryptography for undergraduate and graduate programs in Computer Science. He has been tutoring more than 60 students for their end-of-degree exams. Since 2005 he is a tutor for the department of the Erasmus student exchange program. He has led two projects for young researchers (years 2001 and 2002) which received two-year funds, and he has actively participated in national and international research projects (e.g. joint actions Italy-Spain). He has also been involved in three Italian PRIN projects on encrypted databases, user privacy, and genomic computing, funded for the periods 2006-2008, 2008-2010, and 2012-2014, respectively. He has been a member of the network of excellence in cryptography ECRYPT, IST- 2002-507932, and of the network ECRYPT II, ICT-2007-216646, funded for the periods 2004-2008 and 2008-2012, respectively. From 2014 to 2018 he was the national coordinator for Italy of the COST Action IC1403 on Cryptanalysis of ubiquitous computing systems (CRYPTACUS). He has also been a member of the local organizing committees for the SCN conferences, in 1999, 2002, 2004, 2010, 2012 and 2014, 2016, and 2018, and for DISC, in 2003. He has published more than sixty papers in well-reputed international journals and in the proceedings of conferences on theoretical computer science, cryptography, and data security.