On Friday, September 28 we will launch the new Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute.
Cheriton School of Computer Science Professor Ian Goldberg, along with his PhD student Nik Unger and colleagues, have won three prestigious paper awards at the 2018 Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS). Held this year in Barcelona, Spain from July 24–27, 2018, PETS is the top research venue dedicated to the study and advancement of privacy enhancing technologies.
With the rapid increase of threats on the Internet, people are continuously seeking privacy and anonymity. Services such as Bitcoin and Tor were introduced to provide anonymity for online transactions and Web browsing. Due to its pseudonymity model, Bitcoin lacks retroactive operational security, which means historical pieces of information could be used to identify a certain user.
Many of the most costly security compromises that enterprises suffer manifest as tiny trickles of behavior hidden within oceans of other site activity. This talk will examine the problem of developing robust detectors for particular forms of such activity. The process is in some ways a dual to that of adversaries who seek to design algorithms to identify users who employ particular approaches for keeping their network activity private.
An affiliate of the University of Waterloo’s Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute (CPI), Bessma Momani, leads the winning submission for the Defense Engagement Program.
The submission, The Future of Canadian Defence and Security: New Challenges, New Perspectives, provides a network of external experts for the Department of National Defence (DND), connects and educates the next generation of experts, and helps to inform Canadians about the importance of defence and security matters.
Popular methods of protecting smartphone personal identification number (PINs) may only be successful in safeguarding your personal information 20 per cent of the time, according to a new study out of the University of Waterloo.
Matthew Finkel, The Tor Project
There are hundreds of millions of new "smart" mobile device users every year, but the mobile ecosystem and infrastructure are designed and built for optimizing convenience, not protecting the privacy of the user. From a design flaw in the Internet Protocol to an abundence of physical sensors, a mobile device may tell a third-party more information than the user intended or wanted.
Chelsea Komlo, HashiCorp
Privacy Enhancing Technology communities rely on the research community for help designing and validating protocols, finding potential attack vectors, and applying new technological innovations to existing protocols. However, while the research community has made significant progress studying projects such as Tor, the number of research outcomes that have actually been incorporated into privacy enhancing technologies such as The Tor Project is lower than the number of feasible and useful research outcomes.
Cecylia Bocovich, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
Professor Srinivasan Keshav recently wrote an article for The Conversation Canada about how blockchain technologies could help homeowners sell their green electricity to their neighbours.