Location privacy: tell me where you go and I'll tell you whom you are

The Faculty of Informatics is pleased to announce a seminar given by Paolo Palmieri

DATE: Thursday, March 26th, 2015
PLACE: USI Lugano Campus, room A-14, Red building (Via G. Buffi 13)
TIME: 11.00

ABSTRACT:
What is left of privacy in the age of social media and big data? In a world where our every move is tracked, and eventually ends up in the cloud, some go as far as saying that privacy is not a realistic expectation anymore. While that may sound extreme, everybody will agree that maintaining any level of privacy today is an uphill battle.
This talk focuses on a specific kind of private information: location data. Location-aware applications, which provide services tailored on the geographical position of the user, are in fact increasingly popular.
Why is location information sensitive, and what kinds of risks does it expose us to? What level of privacy can we realistically expect without having to give up using such apps entirely? This talk will give an overview of recent results in location privacy research, and will present a new approach to private location protocols. The new solution is based on secure multi-party computation, a security paradigm where the user and the service provider are able to securely compute a function without any trust in each other.

BIO:
Paolo Palmieri earned a Ph.D. in cryptography at the Crypto Group of the Université catholique de Louvain (Belgium) in January 2013. After a period as visiting researcher in early 2013 at his alma mater, the Università di Bologna (Italy), he is currently a post-doctoral researcher at Delft University of Technology (The Netherlands), where he works in the Parallel and Distributed Systems group.
Most of his research focuses on cryptography and privacy. His research interests include secure computation, privacy enhancing technologies, location privacy and smart cities.

HOSTS: Dr. Francesco Regazzoni, Prof. Miroslaw Malek