News

Media, government, and industry commonly frame security and privacy as diametrically opposed: protecting one requires sacrificing the other. 

Privacy, Infrastructures, Policy brought together researchers with international speakers from journalism, national security, academia and the corporate world to challenge these misconceptions. A central thread of each of the talks is the design, implementation, and benefits of privacy-enhancing social and technological infrastructures.

The University of Waterloo and the Open Application Network (The OAN) are partnering to investigate solutions to the challenge of preserving privacy in the context of Open Applications on blockchain networks.

Waterloo Brewing has lost millions in an impersonation scheme, an incident the company described as a “social engineering cyberattack” by a sophisticated third party. In its November 21, 2019 media release, the Kitchener firm announced that the attack occurred earlier this month and it has not yet recovered any of the $2.1 million wired to the fraudulent third-party account.

The Association for Computing Machinery has named Professor Florian Kerschbaum a Distinguished Member. He joins 62 individuals globally who have received this prestigious recognition in 2019 for outstanding scientific contributions.

A pair of second-year University of Waterloo students shared the top prize at the inaugural Citizen Hacks, a recent hackathon focused on creating technology to protect privacy.

On April 14, 2019, hackers targeted Stratford City Hall with a ransomware attack, which led to several crucial servers becoming unresponsive and unavailable. The attacker had installed malware on six of the city’s physical servers and on two virtual servers, then encrypted all systems so staff could not access information. The attack affected the city’s email system and online forms.

Professor Ian Goldberg, his colleagues David Wagner, Randi Thomas, and former PhD supervisor Eric Brewer have won the 2019 USENIX Security Test of Time Award for their research that also received the Best Paper Award at the Sixth USENIX Security Symposium in 1996.

Researchers at the University of Waterloo have integrated the use of blockchain into energy systems, a development that could result in expanded charging infrastructure for electric vehicles.

In a study that outlines the new blockchain-oriented charging system, the researchers found that there is a lack of trust among charging service providers, property owners and owners of electric vehicles (EVs). 

CPI would like to announce Chang Ge as the recipient of the Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute's Graduate Scholarship sponsored by Symcor 2019/2020.

Chang Ge is a PhD student in the Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo since 2016, advised by Professor Ihab Ilyas. Previously, he obtained a MMath in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo in 2014. His research interest is in the area of data systems, with current interest in managing data quality on private data. His work has been applied in SAP HANA, IBM DB2 and Microsoft Azure Services.