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UCL-EPFL team wins NDSS Distinguished Paper Award

26 February 2018

Carmela and Apostolos receiving the award.

We are very pleased to announce that Apostolos Pyrgelis and Dr Emiliano De Cristofaro, of UCL Department of Computer Science, and their collaborator ٰ, of EPFL, have won one of the two Distinguished Paper Awards at the.

ճtakes place annually in San Diego, and provides a platform for knowledge exchange among researchers and practitioners of network and distributed system security. It is theflagship security conference, and is lauded as one of the top four academic conferences in security.

The winning paper, entitled “”, presented the first study on the feasibility of membership inference attacks on aggregate location time-series.

“It is a real honour to have won a distinguished paper award this year, as there were so many fantastic submissions, said Dr De Cristofaro. “I am very proud of Apostolos’ work on this research, as it demonstrates a very rare and vital combination of foundational insights and real-world work.”

Data aggregation is often considered as a privacy defence mechanism in the context of mobility analytics. However, the team’s paper confirms it is not, as an adversary that can re-identify users whose data is part of the aggregates. In order to show this, they build a framework that includes prior knowledge of the adversary, and that models the attack as an interactive game, which the adversary wins using a machine learning classifier. This framework is applied to differential privacy defences used for time-series release, such as output perturbation, as well as input perturbation, as implemented by companies like Google and Apple.

“Overall, our work means that we now have a way to carefully test the real-world privacy guarantees provided by differential privacy and other defences, as well as the resulting utility.”

ٰis a Reader (Associate Professor) in Security and Privacy Enhancing Technologies at University College London. He conducts research in the field of security and privacy enhancing technologies, more specifically to understand and counter security issues via measurement studies and data-driven analysis, and to tackle problems at the intersection of machine learning and security.

is a PhD candidate based in theat UCL. He is co-supervised by Dr De Cristofaro and ٰ. His research interests includeapplied cryptography,privacy-enhancing technologies,distributed systemsas well asprivacy-friendly analyticsandmachine learningapplications to security.

Please join us in congratulating them on this fantastic achievement!

You can find an open access copy of the paper on the NDSS Symposium website.