Designing End-to-End Privacy-Friendly and Deployable Systems

The EDIC program is happy to invite you to the public talk by our postdoctoral researcher at EPFL Wouter Lueks.
The aim of the talk is to present his achievements to a broad audience to prepare for hiring interviews coming up soon. Be sure to join, listen to the talk and participate in the Q&A session at the end of the presentation.

Abstract
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 focus on my DP-3T and CrowdNotifier designs for digital proximity and presence tracing that help mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic. These designs combine novel cryptographic primitives and communication systems to protect users’ privacy. The DP3T protocol and CrowdNotifier have been deployed to millions of phones. In the second 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.

Bio
Wouter Lueks is a postdoctoral researcher at EPFL in Lausanne where he works with Carmela Troncoso. He designs privacy-friendly systems. His research interests include privacy, applied cryptography, and systems. 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 organisation for investigative journalists.