EVENTS

Dr. Wouter Lueks, CISPA

Digital technology creates risks to people's privacy in ways that did not exist before. I design end-to-end private systems to mitigate these real-world privacy risks. In this talk I will discuss my designs for two applications. These applications highlight key aspects of my work: I analyse security, privacy, and deployment requirements; and address these requirements by designing new cryptographic primitives and system architectures.

In the first part of this talk, I will present DatashareNetwork, a document search system for investigative journalists that enables them to locate relevant documents for their investigations. DatashareNetwork combines a novel multi-set private set intersection primitive with anonymous communication and authentication systems to create a decentralised and privacy-friendly document search system. In the second part of this talk, I will give an overview of my recent work in designing privacy friendly systems for humanitarian aid distribution. In collaboration with the International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC) we designed systems for the registration and distribution of humanitarian aid that meets the requirements of the ICRC, while providing strong privacy protection for humanitarian aid distribution.

Bio:
Wouter Lueks is a tenure-track faculty member at the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security in Saarbrücken, Germany. Before that he was a postdoctoral researcher at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland where he worked with Prof. Carmela Troncoso. He is interested in solving real-world problems by designing end-to-end privacy-friendly systems. To do so he combines privacy, applied cryptography, and systems research. His work has real-world impact. For instance, his designs for privacy-friendly contact tracing have been deployed in millions of phones around the world, and his secure document search system is being deployed by a large organization for investigative journalists. 

Institution

• CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security