About us
The Privacy Technologies Team is a subgroup within COSIC with a broad interest in online privacy studies and expertise in designing, analysing and implementing privacy enhancing technologies.
We do both theoretical research on the nature of identity and privacy protection, and also more applied work and consultancy related to identity card schemes and anonymity infrastructures.
Research topics
- Anonymous Communication Networks
- Traffic Analysis Attacks and Countermeasures
- Biometric profiling, recognition, template protection and multi-factor authentication
- Internet of Things, Internet of Everything
- User and behavior profiling
- Applied Cryptography
- Web tracking and fingerprinting
- Privacy in Social Media
- Interdisciplinary Aspects of Privacy
- Privacy and security by design
- Privacy in mobile applications
Achievements
- Runner-up to the 2018 PET Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies with the paper “How Unique is Your .onion? An Analysis of the Fingerprintability of Tor Onion Services” (by Rebekah Overdorf, Marc Juarez, Gunes Acar, Rachel Greenstadt, and Claudia Diaz; in Proc. of ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, CCS 2017)
- Winner of the CNIL-INRIA 2018 Privacy Protection Award with the paper “Engineering Privacy by Design Reloaded” (by Seda Gurses, Carmela Troncoso, and Claudia Diaz; in Amsterdam Privacy Conference, 2015)
- Finalist for the CCS 2017 Best Paper Award (11 finalists out of 836 submissions, of which 151 were accepted) with the paper “How Unique is Your .onion? An Analysis of the Fingerprintability of Tor Onion Services” (by Rebekah Overdorf, Marc Juarez, Gunes Acar, Rachel Greenstadt, and Claudia Diaz)
- Winner of the Outstanding Paper Award at ESORICS 2016 with the paper “Towards an Efficient Website Fingerprinting Defense” (by Marc Juarez, Mohsen Imani, Mike Perry, Claudia Diaz, and Matthew Wright)
- Runner-up to the 2015 PET Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies with the paper “FPDetective: Dusting the Web for Fingerprinters” (by Gunes Acar, Marc Juarez, Nick Nikiforakis, Claudia Diaz, Seda Gurses, Frank Piessens, and Bart Preneel; in Proc. of ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, CCS 2013)
Education
- Privacy Technologies (B-KUL-H09L2A): This is an optional course of the Master in Electrical Engineering, available to all KU Leuven and Erasmus students. The course takes place in the first term and amounts to 3 ECTS credits.
- Privacy and Big Data (B-KUL-H00Y2A): This is a course of the Master in Artificial Intelligence, option Big Data. The course takes place in the first term and amounts to 4 ECTS credits.
Recent Key Publications
- P. Kumar, D. Gosain, and C. Diaz, “On the Anonymity of Peer-To-Peer Network Anonymity Schemes Used by Cryptocurrencies” In Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS 2023), , Internet Society, pp. 18, 2023.
- I. Ben Guirat, C. Diaz, K. Eldefrawy, and H. Zeilberger, “Mixnet Traffic Analysis by Adversaries with Partial Visibility” In European Symposium on Research in Computer Security – ESORICS 2023, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, , Springer-Verlag, pp. 16, 2023.
- A. Senol, and G. Acar, “Unveiling the Impact of User-Agent Reduction and Client Hints: A Measurement Study” In Proceedings of the 23 ACM Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society (WPES 2023), , ACM, pp. 16, 2023.
- P. Kumar, R. Sharma, S. Chakravarty, M. Maity, and K. Singh, “Dolphin: A Cellular Voice Based Internet Shutdown Resistance System“, Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies 2023(1), pp. 19, 2023.
