Today, data plays an important role in the digital world. Almost all online services explicitly or implicitly rely on data and most of the time, they are sensitive: 

  • They are either privacy-sensitive or 
  • Commercially valuable. 

In our team, it is our ambition to provide solutions where sensitive data from one or more sources are collected in a secure and privacy-preserving manner. Then, the collected data is processed using cryptographic tools, which enable us to provide provable security. Our solutions are custom-designed for efficiency: run-time, storage and bandwidth.

As for the cryptographic tools, we prefer the followings:

  • Homomorphic encryption schemes: Fully, somewhat or partial.
  • Multi-party computation based on additive secret sharing.

We also investigate Differential Privacy and Decentralization (DLT) for our solutions. 

We have developed several solutions using the above tools, sometimes together. Our core interest is in the following topics:

  • Cyber Threat Intelligence where we deploy Private Set Operations to compute unions, intersections among multiple private sets and their cardinality. 
  • Recommender Systems, particularly for medical systems where patient data are used for generating recommendations for improving the well-being of patients.  
  • Data Aggregation protocols, e.g. for smart grids, including energy exchange solutions based on distributed ledger technology and double auction systems. 

For more information, see the Project Results or reach out to Dr. Zeki Erkin. 

 

NEWS! 

Privacy Enhancing Technologies challenge organised by the USA and the UK governments, FDML Huskies won the second prize for financial crime prevention. 

For that challenge, the TU Delft team (Jelle Vos, Celio and Zeki Erkin) worked with the team of the University of Washington Tacoma (Prof. Martine de Cock and her team). 

Below you can see the official announcements from the US government.

 

Are you looking for MSc thesis topics and PhD positions?

For students who are interested in a PhD position in privacy research: Please send an email to me with your CV and a short motivational text.

For MSc thesis students, please take a look at the previous MSc thesis that I supervised and ongoing projects. Also, check the top Security and Privacy conferences and journals for potential topics. Please send me an email with your top 3 choices and a motivational letter.