Marc Manzano by the ocean

Marc Manzano

I fell in love with security and privacy as a teenager through videogames. 15+ years later, I'm at SandboxAQ, securing the AI economy through cryptographic modernization and non-human identity management. Published in Nature. Runner with 24 marathons. Father of two.

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Years in Cybersecurity
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Publications
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Marathons
01 Career

Professional experience.

2022 — Present

SandboxAQ

General Manager, Cybersecurity Group

Leading business unit growth and strategy in cryptographic management, non-human identity management and AI security. Built and scaled AQtive Guard from inception to enterprise adoption. Secured multi-million USD contracts with Fortune 100 banks, governments, and tech companies.

2020 — Present

University of Mondragon

Associate Professor

Teaching and research in cybersecurity and cryptography.

2021 — 2022

Google

Senior Staff Software Engineer

Joined Google to be part of Sandbox@Alphabet group within Google X, to own the cybersecurity area. Spun out at the end of 2021 into SandboxAQ, raising $950M+ USD.

2016 — 2021

Technology Innovation Institute

VP, Cryptography Research Centre

Supervised multiple R&D teams delivering secure cryptographic libraries and protocols. Advanced research in Post-Quantum Cryptography, Lightweight Cryptography, and ML-driven cryptanalysis. Built international collaborations with academia and governments.

2014 — 2016

Scytl

Cryptography Engineer and Team Lead

Developed cryptographic libraries and secure e-voting systems.

02 Publications

Publications.

Scientific Articles

Nature

Journal Article 2022

Transitioning organizations to post-quantum cryptography

A practical playbook for moving large organizations off RSA and elliptic-curve cryptography before quantum computers can break them. It sets out realistic transition timelines, weighs security against performance and ease of implementation, and argues for hybrid schemes that run classical and post-quantum algorithms together to de-risk the switch. It also flags the "harvest now, decrypt later" problem and points to the standards worth piloting today.

Internet of Things

Journal Article 2025

Quantum-resistant pairing evaluation for resource-constrained Bluetooth Classic

An evaluation of whether post-quantum key establishment is actually practical during Bluetooth Classic pairing, on the kind of cheap, battery-powered hardware that has little memory or compute to spare. It benchmarks what quantum-resistant algorithms cost in that setting and weighs the resulting overhead against the limits of the protocol.

IEEE

Journal Article 2022

Survey on Fully Homomorphic Encryption, Theory, and Applications

A broad survey of fully homomorphic encryption — the long-sought ability to compute directly on encrypted data without ever decrypting it. It builds up from the lattice math the schemes rest on to their security properties, then gets practical: where FHE fits in privacy-preserving machine learning and cloud and fog computing, and how the main software and hardware libraries actually perform. A useful map of the field from Gentry's 2009 breakthrough to today's toolchain.

Scientific Reports

Journal Article 2014

Robustness surfaces of complex networks

Network robustness had been measured a dozen different ways, with no clean way to combine or compare them. This work pulls those metrics together with principal component analysis, defines a single R*-value, and introduces the "robustness surface" — a way to see at a glance how a network's resilience holds up across different failure scenarios. Tested on real infrastructure like power grids and railways, it shows the same network can look very different depending on how it's attacked.

View all publications on Google Scholar

Patents

03 Education

Academic foundations.

2014

PhD, Computer Networks Security

University of Girona — Cum Laude

2012

MSc, Computer Science

University of Girona — GPA 9.3/10

2011

BSc, Computer Science Engineering

University of Girona — GPA 8.9/10

04 About

About me.

Marc running a marathon

Sports

  • 24 marathons (PB 2h 49min @ Barcelona Marathon 2026)
  • Gravel cycling enthusiast
  • Surfing, snowboarding, diving, football, hiking

Interests

  • History
  • Modern languages — Spanish, Catalan, English, Basque, Italian and a little Portuguese and French
  • Videogames
  • 60+ countries traveled

Volunteering

05 Contact

Get in touch.

Interested in cryptography, security and privacy, or just want to talk about running and Roman history? Let's connect.