Danny De Cock received a master's degree in Computer Science at the K.U.Leuven in 1996. Immediately after his studies, he started working as a full time researcher in applied cryptography at the same university's group ESAT/COSIC, which is specialized in computer security and industrial cryptography applications.
His research has mainly focused on security-related aspects found in applications like electronic banking, internet voting, secure telematics and domotics, biometric authentication, pseudo-randomness, the design and deployment of public-key infrastructures in general and the Belgian Electronic Identity card in particular.