On Privacy Notions in Anonymous Communication
13.12.2019 von 14:00 bis 15:00
Many anonymous communication networks (ACNs) with different privacy goals have been developed. Still, there are no accepted formal definitions of privacy goals, and ACNs often define their goals ad hoc. However, the formal definition of privacy goals benefits the understanding and comparison of different flavors of privacy and, as a result, the improvement of ACNs. In this talk I'll present how we worked towards defining and comparing privacy goals by formalizing them as privacy notions and identifying their building blocks. For any pair of notions we prove whether one is strictly stronger, and, if so, which. Hence, we are able to present a complete hierarchy. Using this rigorous comparison between notions, we revise inconsistencies between the existing works and improve the understanding of privacy goals.
Bio:
Thorsten Strufe is Professor for IT Security at KIT, Karlsruhe, Honorary Professor for Privacy and Network Security at TU Dresden, Deputy Speaker of the Cluster of Excellence for Tactile Internet (CeTI, Centre for the Tactile Internet with Human-in-the-Loop) and PI of the Research Training Group RoSI and the 5G-Lab Germany. He is concerned with the questions how web services and smart phone applications cannot only be made secure, but protect the privacy of their users at the same time. His group measures and analyzes behavioral data on a large scale and develops algorithms and protocols for decentralizing the systems to secure the underlying networks and detecting anomalies at different levels (misconfigurations, attacks, fake news), towards this end.
His research contributed to uncovering and publicising data protection problems in social media (profile cloning, "Safebook"), simplifying privacy settings in social media ("Facebook Privacy Watcher"), investigating and reducing data protection problems in the use of printers ("DFD Printer Anonymisation"), as well as formally investigating anonymisation networks and making their actual protection against new attacks formally verifiable.