Viewing Privacy as a Security Property

In recent years user privacy has become an issue for computer system designers, service providers, and an active field of study in academia. Yet it is often seen as a side-issue, or an add-on to already established software or service models. Sometimes privacy is even seen as antithetical to security.

This talk will argue that privacy properties are merely security properties that focus on the interests of users. We shall examine the state of the art in privacy technology that attempts to provide anonymity, plausible deniability, forward secrecy, personal data minimisation and compulsion resistance and censorship/blocking resistance. I will illustrate how each of these can be used to satisfy particular security needs that users encounter routinely.

Such privacy properties are becoming increasingly important, and can be seen as key security properties expected by home or small business users – often more important then conventional security notions, such as hard confidentiality or non-repudiation of signatures.

Speaker Details

George Danezis is postdoctoral visiting fellow at the Cosic group, K.U.Leuven, in Flanders, Belgium. He has been researching anonymous communications, privacy enhancing technologies, and traffic analysis for the last 6 years, at K.U.Leuven and the University of Cambridge, where he completed his doctoral dissertation.His theoretical contributions to the PET field include the established information theoretic metric for anonymity and the study of statistical attacks against mix systems. On the practical side he is one of the lead designers of Mixminion, the next generation remailer, and has worked on the traffic analysis of deployed protocols such as SSL and Tor. He was the co-chair of the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Workshop in 2005 and 2006, he serves on the PET workshop board and has participated in multiple conference and workshop program committees in the privacy and security field.Homepage: http://homes.esat.kuleuven.be/~gdanezis/(Full CV: http://homes.esat.kuleuven.be/~gdanezis/gd216-cv.pdf)

Date:
Speakers:
George Danezis
Affiliation:
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven