David Basin is a full professor within the Department of Computer Science, ETH Zurich since 2003, where he heads the Information Security Group. He served as department head from 2019-2020.
He received his bachelor's degree in mathematics from Reed College, his Ph.D. from Cornell University, and his Habilitation from the University of Saarbrücken. His appointments include a postdoctoral research position at the University of Edinburgh, and afterwards he led a subgroup, within the programming logics research group, at the Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik. Prior to joining ETH Zurich, he was a full professor at the University of Freiburg where he held the chair for software engineering.
His research focuses on Information Security, in particular on foundations, methods, and tools for modeling, building, and validating secure and reliable systems. He is Editor-in-Chief of Springer-Verlag's book series on Information Security and Cryptography and was previously Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security. His research awards include Best Paper Awards (RV'11, RV'14, ATVA '18, Usenix '24, CCS '25) and Test of Time Awards (Models 2012, SACMAT 2020). He received the Levchin Prize in 2026 at Real World Cryptography for his work on the Tamarin Prover. He is a Fellow of the ACM and of the IEEE.
He has worked extensively with industry in various roles. He co-founded of 3db Access (acquired by Infineon), Anapaya Systems, and Thenti. He is also the founding director of ZISC, the Zurich Information Security Center, which he led from 2003-2011.
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