Personal
Homepage
of
Claudia Diaz
Contact
details
What
I
am busy
with... (Complete list of publications and other work)
Links
Who am I
Since
2006, I am a postdoctoral researcher at the COSIC research group of
the
Department of Electrical Engineering (ESAT)
at the K.U.Leuven. This group is headed by Professors Bart Preneel, Ingrid
Verbauwhede, and Vincent
Rijmen. I did my Ph.D. at COSIC supervised by
Prof. Bart Preneel
and
Prof. Joos
Vandewalle, and defended my doctoral thesis entitled Anonymity
and
Privacy
in Electronic Services in December 2005. Before that, I
obtained in 2000 my Master’s degree in Telecommunications Engineering
at the
University of Vigo (Spain). Between January and March 2009, I was a
research
visitor at the Computer
Lab
Security
Group in Cambridge (UK). Since October 2009, I am funded
by a
post-doctoral research grant from the National Fund for Scientific
Research in
Flanders (FWO).
As you can see here,
COSIC is a
very large group consisting of around 60 people. COSIC is divided in
several
semi-formal subgroups each focusing on a research area, and one of my
tasks
within COSIC is to coordinate the Privacy and
Identity
Management subgroup, which consists of around 15 people.
My
research is focused on Privacy Enhancing Technologies, and I have
published a few research
papers in collaboration with many different co-authors.
The
research questions I am most interested in are:
·
Formalization, modeling
and quantification of
privacy properties such as anonymity, unlinkability,
unobservability and
deniability. The goal of this line of work is to define models that
provide a
better understanding of what is meant by privacy, and
metrics that are useful to assess
the level of privacy protection provided by different systems. One of
my main
research contributions has been the proposal of information-theoretic
anonymity
metrics.
·
Design and analysis of
privacy preserving systems.
A big part of my work in this area has dealt with anonymous
communication
systems, whose goal is to preserve the confidentiality of
communication relationships – i.e., to conceal who talks
to whom. This is an important
problem because these relationships leak information that can be used
to infer
lots of sensitive personal data; and also a difficult one since it is
much
easier to gather and analyze traffic data than to
design secure and practical systems that
protect against traffic
analysis attacks. I am also interested in other applications such
as privacy-preserving
identity
management, social
networks,
location privacy, steganographic
file
systems, negative
databases, and private
search.
· Interdisciplinary aspects of privacy. Privacy is not just a technical discipline – it has relevant legal, social, economic, cultural, and political aspects. Therefore, it is very important for researchers working on privacy to have a good understanding of the broader context of the subject. For many years, I have worked in close collaboration with the lawyers at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Law and ICT (ICRI), as well as with researchers of the DistriNet group at the Dept. of Computer Science, in the context of the APES and ADAPID projects. Between 2004 and 2009 I have been actively involved with the FP6 FIDIS Network of Excellence, where I have worked together with researchers from a variety of backgrounds. I am an Associate Editor of the multidisciplinary Journal on Identity in the Information Society (IDIS), and a member of the Scientific Committee of the Computers, Privacy and Data Protection Conference (CPDP), whose aim is to create a bridge between policymakers, academics, practitioners and activists.
Besides
writing research papers,
I
spend
a fair amount of time doing reviews
for
conferences, journals, and projects. I am or have been a Program
Committee member in more than twenty conferences, including several
editions of the ACM
Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), the Privacy
Enhancing
Technologies Symposium
(PETS), and the Information
Security
Conference (ISC).
I have also reviewed papers for more
than a dozen journals,
many
of
which are JCR indexed. I have reviewed project proposals for the
Dutch
security research program Sentinels,
and
I
am project reviewer for IST FP7 projects funded by the European
Commission.
COSIC
participates in a lot of projects,
and
I
contribute in one way or another to several
of them. I
am in charge of coordinating ADAPID,
and
I
was the main contact person in the group for the FIDIS
Network of Excellence. You can find here
more information about the projects I am (or have been) involved with,
and the project
reports I have co-authored are available here.
I
have organized a number of events,
most
of
which were project related workshops. I was also the General Chair
of
the 8th Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS’08), which took place in
Leuven
and was attended by more than a hundred people, and Local Organizing
Chair of
the Workshop on Trustworthy Elections (WOTE'08).
I
am
a member of the Advisory Board of the PET
Symposium and the Scientific Committee of the CPDP Conference, as well as
an Associate Editor of the IDIS
journal.
I
have given around 50 talks
and
participated several discussion panels as either panelist or moderator
(the slides
are available here).
I
try
to keep track of the events I have attended by maintaining a list here.
I
supervise a number of Master students,
and
I
am Ph.D. co-advisor of Carmela Troncoso.
I
have followed language courses of French (level C1), Portuguese (level
B2) and
Dutch (intermediate level 2) at the CLT
and ILT.
Selected
Publications
- Systems
for
Anonymous Communication. George Danezis, Claudia Diaz,
and Paul Syverson. In CRC Handbook of Financial Cryptography and
Security, CRC Cryptography and Network Security Series, B. Rosenberg,
and D. Stinson (Eds.), Chapman & Hall, 61 pages (in print), 2009
- The wisdom of Crowds: attacks and optimal constructions. George Danezis, Claudia Diaz, Emilia Käsper, and Carmela Troncoso. To appear in 14th European Symposium on Research in Computer Security (ESORICS 2009), 18 pages (in print), 2009.
- A Framework for the Analysis of Mix-Based Steganographic File Systems. Claudia Diaz, Carmela Troncoso and Bart Preneel. In 13th European Symposium on Research in Computer Security (ESORICS 2008), S. Jajodia, and J. Lopez (Eds), Springer LNCS 5283, pp. 428-445, 2008.
- On the Impact of Social Network Profiling on Anonymity. Claudia Diaz, Carmela Troncoso and Andrei Serjantov. In Proceedings of the 8th Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS'08), N. Borisov and I. Goldberg (Eds), Springer LNCS 5134, pp. 44-62, 2008.
- Traffic Analysis Attacks on a Continuously-Observable Steganographic File System. Carmela Troncoso, Claudia Diaz, Orr Dunkelman and Bart Preneel. In proceedings of 9th Information Hiding (IH'07), T. Furon et al. (Eds), Springer LNCS 4567, pp. 220-236, 2007.
- Space-Efficient Private Search. George Danezis and Claudia Diaz. In the Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC'07), S. Dietrich and R. Dhamija (Eds), Springer LNCS 4886, pp. 148-162, 2007.
- Comparison between two practical mix designs. Claudia Diaz, Len Sassaman and Evelyne Dewitte. Computer Security (ESORICS'04), P. Samarati et al. (Eds), Springer LNCS 3193, pp. 141-159, 2004.
- Reasoning about the Anonymity Provided by Pool Mixes that Generate Dummy Traffic. Claudia Diaz and Bart Preneel. Information Hiding (IH'04), J. Fridrich (Ed.), Springer LNCS 3200, pp. 309-325, 2004.
- Generalising Mixes. Claudia Diaz and Andrei Serjantov. In the proceedings of Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PET'03), R. Dingledine (Ed.), Springer LNCS 2760, pp. 18-31, 2003.
- Towards measuring anonymity. Claudia Diaz, Stefaan Seys, Joris Claessens and Bart Preneel. Designing Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PET'02), R. Dingledine and P. Syverson (Eds.), Springer LNCS 2482, pp. 54-68, 2002.