Personal
Homepage of Claudia Diaz
What I am busy with... (Complete list of publications and other
work)
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. To keep it manageable, it is divided in several semi-formal subgroups 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 bunch of 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, the Scientific Committee of the CPDP Conference, and the Editorial Board of the Future Internet Journal, 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.