David Basin
Affiliated Professor of Computer Science
Research Interests
Professor Basin’s research focuses on Information Security – in particular the foundations, methods, and tools for modeling, building, and validating secure and reliable systems. He also works on the construction of high assurance systems for security-critical applications like networking, authentication, and access control. Email
Alongside his role at MBZUAI, Professor Basin is Professor of Information Security at ETH Zurich, where he founded and directed the Zurich Information Security Center (ZISC) and served as Department Head. He is also Affiliate Professor at the Institute for Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence and Technology (INSAIT) in Bulgaria, and has also held senior academic and research positions as Senior Scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Saarbrücken and Professor, and Institute Head at the University of Freiburg in Germany.
Professor Basin has authored more than 300 publications, including four research monographs, and served as Editor-in-Chief of the ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security and of Springer’s book series Information Security and Cryptography. In addition to his academic contributions, he has co-founded three security companies, serves on the Board of Directors of Anapaya Systems AG, and participates in various management and scientific advisory boards.
Professor Basin is recognized as a Fellow of the IEEE and a Fellow of the ACM, honoring his significant contributions to the fields of cybersecurity, privacy, and cryptographic systems.
-
Habilitation in Computer Science from Universität des Saarlandes
-
Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell University
-
Master of Science in Computer Science from Cornell University
-
Bachelor of Science in Mathematics from Reed College
- 2024 Swiss Cyber Defense Campus Award for rising security technology.
- 2024 Dandelion Entrepreneurship Award at ETH Zurich.
- 2024 Distinguished Paper Award at Usenix 2024.for paper PURE: Payments with UWB RElay-protection.
- 2023 Teaching Award from the VIS (ETH Zurich Informatik Student Association).2022 Distinguished Artifact Award at Usenix
- 2022 Distinguished Artifact Award at Usenix 2022 for the system Automating Cookie Consent and GDPR Violation Detection.
- 2021 Best Practical Paper Award at IEEE S&P 2021.
- 2021 IEEE Fellow.
- 2020 Test of Time Award at ACM Symposium on Access Control Models and Technologies (SACMAT), for paper On the Definition of Role Mining.
- 2019 ACM Fellow.
- 2019 Member of Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences.
- 2018 GSMA Mobile Security Research Hall of Fame for analysis of security vulnerabilities in 5G standard.
- 2018 IEEE Senior Member.
- 2018 Distinguished Paper Award, International Symposium on Automated Technology for Verification and Analysis, Optimal Proofs for Linear Temporal Logic on Lasso Words.
- 2014 Best Paper Award, International Conference on Runtime Verification. Scalable Offline Monitoring.
- 2013 Velux Visiting Professorship Award, awarded by the Villum foundation, Denmark.
- 2012 Ten Year Most Influential Paper Award at MODELS 2012, SecureUML: A UML-Based Modeling Language for Model-Driven Security.
- 2010–2012 IBM Open Collaborative Faculty Award.
- 2011 Best Tool Paper Award, International Conference on Runtime Verification. MONPOLY: Monitoring Usage-Control Policies.
- 2010 ACM Recognition of Service Award.
The following are examples of representative books and articles:
- Modeling and Analyzing Security Protocols with Tamarin: A Comprehensive Guide. David Basin, Cas Cremers, Jannik Dreier, and Ralf Sasse. Springer-Verlag, 2025.
- Felix Linker, Ralf Sasse, and David Basin. A Formal Analysis of Apple’s iMessage PQ3 Protocol. 34th Usenix Security Symposium (Usenix), Seattle USA, August 2025.
- Dhruv Nevatia, Si Liu and David Basin. Reachability Analysis of the Domain Name System. Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages (POPL), 9(62):1–31, January 2025.
- Lorenzo Ceragioli, Letterio Galletta, Pierpaolo Degano and David Basin. Specifying and Verifying Information Flow Control in SELinux Configurations. ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security, 27(4):1–35, October 2024.
- David Basin, Patrick Schaller and Jorge Toro-Pozo. Inducing Authentication Failures to Bypass Credit Card PINs. 32nd USENIX Security Symposium (Usenix), pages 3065-3079, Anaheim USA, August 2023.
- The Complete Guide to SCION: From Design Principles to Formal Verification. Laurent Chuat, Markus Legner, David Basin, David Hausheer, Samuel Hitz, Peter Müller, and Adrian Perrig. Springer-Verlag, 2022.
- Christoph Sprenger, Tobias Klenze, Marco Eilers, Felix Wolf, Peter Müller, Martin Clochard and David Basin. Igloo: Soundly Linking Compositional Refinement and Separation Logic for Distributed System Verification. Proceedings ACM on Programming Languages (OOPSLA), 4(152): 1–31, Chicago USA,November 2020.