Emiliano De Cristofaro is a PhD candidate at the University of
California, Irvine (UCI). He has been as a research intern at: NEC
Europe Labs Heidelberg (Germany), INRIA Rhone Alpes (France), and Nokia
Research Center Lausanne (Switzerland). His research interests include
security, privacy, and applied cryptography.
Modern society is increasingly dependent on (and fearful of) massive
amounts and availability of electronic information. There are numerous
everyday scenarios where sensitive data must be -- sometimes reluctantly
or suspiciously -- shared between two or more entities without mutual
trust. This prompts the need for mechanisms to enable limited
(privacy-preserving) sharing of sensitive information. Among them,
Private Set Intersection (PSI) techniques are particularly appealing
whenever two parties wish to compute an intersection of their respective
sets of items without revealing to each other any other information,
beyond the intersection. This talk motivates the need for PSI techniques
with various features and illustrates several concrete PSI variants that
offer appreciably better efficiency than prior work and guarantee
stronger privacy properties. Finally, motivated by proliferation of
smartphones, and increasing amount of personal information shared
ubiquitously, we identify some privacy issues specific to smartphone
environments. We present several solutions geared for privacy-enhanced
smartphone applications, such as: scheduling, location/interest sharing,
and participatory sensing.