This speaker series is made possible by
an anonymous charitable donation in memory of cypherpunks and privacy
advocates Len
Sassaman, Hugh
Daniel, Hal
Finney, and Caspar Bowden.
Most of the talks are video recorded, and are viewable on this site or on
our YouTube channel.
Upcoming speakers
Henry Corrigan-Gibbs, MIT
TBD, in some on-campus location when things reopen
Past speakers
2024-2025
21 Oct 2024: Alex Ozdemir, Stanford University
"Collaborative zk-SNARKs: Zero-Knowledge Proofs for Distributed Secrets" 
6 May 2024: Colin Bennett, University of Victoria
"Profiling the Political Influence Industry in Canada in the age of AI: Privacy Protection and Democratic Accountability"
2023-2024
3 Apr 2024: Kathrin Hövelmanns, Eindhoven University of Technology
"Fujisaki-Okamoto — a recipe for post-quantum public key encryption"
15 Mar 2024: Yibin Yang, Georgia Institute of Technology
"Zero-Knowledge Proofs Beyond Circuits and Constraints — How to Efficiently Build a “ZK CPU”"
6 Feb 2024: Alex Zhang, GFW Report
"How the Great Firewall of China Detects and Blocks Fully Encrypted Traffic"
2 Feb 2024: Yan Shvartzshnaider, York University
"PrivaCI — Privacy through Contextual Integrity"
23 Nov 2023: Kevin Yeo, Google and Columbia University
"Private Information Retrieval: Improvements and Limitations"
19 Oct 2023: Marina Blanton, University at Buffalo
"A Bigger Picture of Secure Multi-Party Computation"
25 Sep 2023: Gururaj Saileshwar, University of Toronto
"Micro-Architectural Side-Channel Attacks and Defenses: CPU Caches, Schedulers, and Beyond!"
2 Jun 2023: Joel Reardon, University of Calgary
"CVE-2022-23491, or Why PO boxes can't be root certificate authorities anymore"
2022-2023
2 Nov 2022: Sri AravindaKrishnan Thyagarajan, NTT Research
"Cryptographic Locks For Cryptocurrency Payments"
17 May 2022: Pamela Wisniewski, University of Central Florida
"Risk and Resilience: Promoting Adolescent Online Safety and Privacy through Human-Centered Computing"
2021-2022
8 Apr 2022: Smith Oduro-Marfo, University of Victoria
"Surveillance for Development? Implications of Surveillance-oriented Citizen Identification Systems in Global South countries"
19 Jan 2022: Sarah Lamdan, The City University of New York
"Data Analytics Companies in Academia"
24 Nov 2021: Wouter Lueks, EPFL
"Privacy-friendly presence and proximity tracing"
4 Oct 2021: Glencora Borradaile, Oregon State University
"Cybersecurity and the Protection of Dissent"
23 Jul 2021: Angela Sasse, Ruhr Universität Bochum
"Digital fitness instead of blame and entrapment: re-framing "security awareness""
27 May 2021: Lorrie Faith Cranor, Carnegie Mellon University
"Designing Useful and Usable Privacy Interfaces"
2020-2021
29 Mar 2021: David Evans, University of Virginia
"When Models Learn Too Much"
30 Oct 2020: Riana Pfefferkorn, Stanford Center for Internet and Society
"What's New in the U.S. Crypto Wars?"
6 Oct 2020: Safiya Umoja Noble, UCLA
"Taking on Big Tech: New Paradigms for New Possibilities"
2019-2020
28 Feb 2020: Cat Coode, Binary Tattoo
"GDPR and CPPA and PIPEDA, Oh my!"
28 Feb 2020: Oliver Linow, Deutsche Welle
"Using Tor as a Public Broadcaster"
28 Feb 2020: Scott Millar, Communications Security Establishment
"Trust and Confidence: The Symbiotic Relationship of Privacy and Intelligence in Protecting Canada"
28 Feb 2020: Maura Grossman, University of Waterloo
"Bias in Data-Driven Decision Making"
28 Feb 2020: Julia Angwin, The Markup
"Data is the New Narrative"
1 Nov 2019: Crispin Cowan, Leviathan Security Group
"Privacy: Who Ya Gonna Trust?"
24 Oct 2019: Stefan Saroiu, Microsoft Research
"Are We Susceptible to Rowhammer? An End-to-End Methodology for Cloud Providers"
13 May 2019: Sarah Roberts, UCLA
"Doing the Internet's Dirty Work: Commercial Content Moderators as Social Media's Gatekeepers"
2018-2019
2 Nov 2018: Nate Cardozo, Electronic Frontier Foundation
"Fantastically Bad Laws and Where to Find Them"
25 Sep 2018: Adam Molnar, Deakin University
"Evaluating the Australian Government’s Legislative Response to the Encryption Debate"
9 Aug 2018: Aiman Erbad, Qatar University
"When A Small Leak Sinks A Great Ship: Deanonymizing Tor Hidden Service Users Through Bitcoin Transactions Analysis"
31 Jul 2018: Vern Paxson, University of California, Berkeley / Corelight, Inc. / International Computer Science Institute
"Finding Very Damaging Needles in Very Large Haystacks"
10 Jul 2018: Matthew Finkel, The Tor Project
""Where's Waldo?" - Privacy in the age of Internet-connected mobile technology"
9 Jul 2018: Chelsea Komlo, HashiCorp
"Where Theory Meets Practice for Privacy Enhancing Technologies"
2017-2018
19 Apr 2018: Joel Reardon, University of Calgary
"“Won’t Somebody Think of the Children?” Examining COPPA Compliance at Scale"
6 Feb 2018: Micheal Vonn, BC Civil Liberties Association
"CSIS Bulk Data Collection and National Security Surveillance"
8 Nov 2017: Andreas Peter, University of Twente
"Somewhat Homomorphic Encryption and its Attractiveness in Privacy-Enhancing Technologies"
27 Oct 2017: Lex Gill, The Citizen Lab
"Rearranging Power Through Law and Code: Deciphering the Canadian Encryption Debate"
26 Jul 2017: Ross Anderson, University of Cambridge
"Making Security Sustainable"
16 Jun 2017: Prashant Nalini Vasudevan, MIT
"Average-Case Fine-Grained Hardness, and What To Do With It"
5 May 2017: Lisa Austin, University of Toronto
"Access to basic subscriber information and the Spencer Decision: disentangling normative and technological questions"
2016-2017
13 Mar 2017: Josh Benaloh, Microsoft Research
"Elections with both Privacy and Integrity"
3 Feb 2017: Nikita Borisov, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
"The State of Secure Messaging: Ratchets, Keys, and Metadata"
2 Feb 2017: Sarah Jamie Lewis, OnionScan
"OnionScan: Practical Deanonymization of Hidden Services"
1 Feb 2017: Frank Wang, MIT
"Sieve: Cryptographically Enforced Access Control for User Data in Untrusted Clouds"
1 Dec 2016: David Murakami Wood, Queen's University
"Hack the Planet! From phone phreaking to subverting planetary infrastructures"
15 Sep 2016: Valerie Steeves, University of Ottawa
"What Hello Barbie Can Tell Us About Behavioural Targeting"
7 Jul 2016: Paul van Oorschot, Carleton University
"Password expiration policies: quantifying assumed security benefits"
10 May 2016: David Wu, Stanford University
"Constraining Pseudorandom Functions Privately"
2015-2016
1 Apr 2016: Seda Gürses, Princeton University
"PET Sematary: Privacy's return from the dead and the rise of Privacy Engineering"
11 Mar 2016: Eva Infeld, Darthmouth College
"Matching Theory and Anonymity"
2 Feb 2016: Alison Macrina, Library Freedom Project
"Grassroots surveillance resistance at your local library"
20 Jan 2016: Rob Jansen, Naval Research Laboratory
"Shadow: Scalable Simulation for Systems Security Research"
2 Dec 2015: Matthew Wright, University of Texas at Arlington
"Teaching Users Random System-Assigned Passwords"
1 Sep 2015: Nicholas Hopper, University of Minnesota
"Secure Load Balancing in Tor with Peerflow"
27 Jul 2015: Amir Herzberg, Bar Ilan University
"Cross-site Search Attacks: Practical Side-channel Privacy
Attacks on Web Services"
2014-2015
5 Aug 2014: Nicholas Hopper, University of Minnesota
"New adversary models for censorship circumvention schemes"
25 Jul 2014: Joseph Bonneau, Center for Information Technology Policy
"Storing 56-bit keys in human memory"
4 Jul 2014: Christopher Parsons, University of Toronto
"Stuck on the Agenda—Lesson drawing from 'lawful access'
issues in Canada"
18 Jun 2014: Radu Sion, Stony Brook University
"Modern Secure Data Management"
2013-2014
24 Apr 2014: Rajesh Krishna Balan, Singapore Management
University
"The LiveLabs Urban LifeStyle Innovation Platform:
Opportunities, Challenges, and Current Results"
27 Mar 2014: Kevin Dyer, Portland State University
"Libfte: A User-Friendly Toolkit for Constructing Practical
Format-Abiding Encryption Schemes"
31 Jan 2014: Rob Johnson, Stony Brook University
"Website Fingerprinting Attacks and Defenses"
16 Dec 2013: N. Asokan, Aalto University
"On Mobile Malware"
21 Oct 2013: Kelly Caine, Clemson University
"A human-centered tool for enhancing patient privacy in
electronic medical record systems"
9 Oct 2013: Patrick Traynor, Georgia Institute of Technology
"Chasing Telephony Security: Where the Wild Things... Are?"
26 Jun 2013: Vaibhav Garg, Drexel University
"Cars, Condoms, and the Privacy Paradox: A Case Study with Facebook"
2012-2013
16 Apr 2013: Michael Reiter, University of North Carolina
"How to Misuse, Use, and Mitigate Side Channels in Virtualized Environments"
5 Apr 2013: Claudia Diaz, KU Leuven
"Two tales of privacy in online social networks"
3 Apr 2013: Michael Brennan, SecondMuse
"Catalyzing Social Change as a Privacy and Security
Technologist"
14 Mar 2013: Dawn Song, UC Berkeley
"Privacy in Emerging Technologies: Challenges, Attacks, and Defenses"
28 Jan 2013: Gabriella Coleman, McGill University
"Weapons of the Geek"
10 Oct 2012: Ian Kerr, University of Ottawa
"Repo Men Are Coming: Body EULAs, Privacy and Security of the
Person"
11 Sep 2012: Patrick Ball, Benetech
"Human rights, data analysis, and the truth: technical and
epistemological reflections from twenty years building software and
doing
analysis to study mass atrocities"
14 Aug 2012: Joel Reardon, ETH Zurich
"Data Node Encrypted File System: Efficient Secure Deletion for
Flash Memory"
2 Aug 2012: Micah Sherr, Georgetown University
"Security and Privacy of Legally Authorized Telephone Surveillance"
2011-2012
- 19 Jan 2012: Sonia Chiasson, Carleton University
- "The convergence of human factors and computer security"
- 12 Dec 2011: Nadia Heninger, UC San Diego
- "Approximate common divisors via lattices"
- 14 Nov 2011: Eugene Vasserman, Kansas State University
-
"Censorship Resistant Overlay Publishing"
- 21 Nov 2011: Vinod Vaikuntanathan, University of Toronto
- "Computing Blindfolded: New Developments in Fully Homomorphic Encryption"
- 24 October 2011: Kevin Bauer, University of Waterloo
- "Improving Security and Performance in Low-Latency Anonymity Networks"
- 7 September 2011: Tamir Tassa, The Open University of Israel
- "Generalized Oblivious Transfer by Secret Sharing"
- 8 August 2011: Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi, Technical University Darmstadt
- "Cloudy and Phony: On the Convergence of Cloud and Smartphone Security"
- 26 July 2011: Jean-Pierre Hubaux, EPFL
- "Two Short Talks about the Security of Web Applications"
- 28 May 2011: Ryan Henry, University of Waterloo
- "Formalizing and Extending Anonymous Blacklisting Systems"
2010-2011 (MITACS Speaker Series on Privacy)
- 1 April 2011: Matthew Wright, University of Texas at Arlington
- "Removing Detectable Statistics from Covert Channels"
- 11 March 2011: Prateek Mittal, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
- "Throughput Fingerprinting-based Traffic Analysis of Low Latency
Anonymous Communication"
- 8 Mar 2011: Mohammad Hossein Manshaei, EPFL
- "Game Theory Meets Network Security and Privacy"
- 15 Dec 2010: Femi Olumofin, University of Waterloo
- "Preserving Access Privacy Over Large Databases"
- 10 Dec 2010: Aleksander Essex, University of Waterloo
- "Eperio: Mitigating Technical Complexity in Cryptographic Election Verificaiton"
- 9 Dec 2010: Ryan Henry, University of Waterloo
- "Nymbler: Privacy-enhanced Protection from Abuses of Anonymity"
- 3 Dec 2010: Jeremy Clark, University of Waterloo
- "Selections: An Internet Voting System with Over-the-shoulder Coercion Resistance"
- 1 Dec 2010: Femi Olumofin, University of Waterloo
- "Revisiting the Computational Practicality of Private Information Retrieval"
- 26 Nov 2010: Aleksander Essex, University of Waterloo
- "Hacking Democracy: An Election Fraudster's Tricks of the Trade"
- 12 Nov 2010: Stacey Jeffery, University of Waterloo
- "Dealing with Ghosts: Trading Robustness for Correctness and Privacy in Certain Multiparty Functions, Beyond an Honest Majority"
- 22 October 2010: Kevin Bauer, University of Colorado
- "Toward Improving Tor's Security and Performance"
- 24 September 2010: Alessandro Acquisti, Carnegie Mellon University
- "Privacy, Behavioral Economics, and the Control Paradox"
- 9 Sep 2010: Christian Henrich, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
- "Bingo Voting — Verifiable Voting Scheme Based on a Trusted Random Number Generator"
- 26 July 2010: Maura Paterson, Birkbeck, University of London
- "Distinct-difference configurations: multihop paths and key predistribution in sensor networks"
- 14 July 2010: Atefeh Mashatan, EPFL
- "A Message Recognition Protocol Based on Standard Assumptions"
- 12 July 2010: Tara Whalen, Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada
- "Technology and Privacy: A Short Tour through an Emerging Landscape"
A video of the talk is available.
- 8 July 2010: Greg Zaverucha, University of Waterloo
- "Constant-Size Commitments to Polynomials and Their Applications"
- 5 July 2010: Qi Xie, University of Waterloo
- "Privacy-Preserving Interest Matching for Mobile Social Networking"
- 25 June 2010: Michael Reiter, University of North Carolina
- "Defending Against Client Compromises in Client-Server Applications"
- 21 Jun 2010: Can Tang, University of
Waterloo
- "An Improved Algorithm for Tor Circuit Scheduling"
- 27 May 2010: Aniket Kate, University of Waterloo
- "Distributed Private-Key Generators for Identity-Based Cryptography"
- 11 May 2010: Roger Dingledine, The Tor Project
- "Tor and censorship: lessons learned"
- 7 May 2010: Rachel Greenstadt, Drexel University
- "Privacy & Stylometry: Exploring the Limitations and Potential of
Automated Authorship Recognition"
2009-2010 (MITACS Speaker Series on Privacy)
- 19 March 2010: Rosario Gennaro, IBM Research
- "Non-Interactive Verifiable Computing: Outsourcing
Computation to Untrusted Workers"
- 9 March 2010: Tadayoshi Kohno, University of Washington
- "Increasing Privacy with Self-destructing Data"
- 5 March 2010: Wanying Luo, University of Waterloo
- "Designing a Privacy-Aware Location Proof Architecture"
- 5 February 2010: Jeremy Clark, University of Waterloo
- "The First Governmental Election with a Voter Verifiable Tally: Experiences using Scantegrity II at Takoma Park"
- 15 January 2010: Nick Hopper, University of Minnesota
- "Scalable Anonymous Overlay Networks"
- 14 January 2010: Aniket Kate, University of Waterloo
- "Using Sphinx to Improve Onion Routing Circuit Construction"
- 3 December 2009: Sherman Chow, New York University
- "Improving Privacy and Security in Multi-Authority Attribute-Based Encryption"
- 1 December 2009: Periklis Papakonstantinou, University of Toronto
- "On the Impossibility of Basing Identity Based Encryption on Trapdoor Permutations"
- 29 October 2009: Berkant
Ustaoğlu, NTT Information Sharing Platform Laboratories
- "Multi-party Off-the-Record Messaging"
- 15 October 2009: Greg Zaveruca, University of Waterloo
- "The Identity Mixer Anonymous Credential System"
- 1 October 2009: Jason Hinek, University of Calgary
- "Towards Attribute-Based Encryption Without Key Delegation"
- 22 July 2009: Ian Goldberg, University of Waterloo
- "Sphinx: A Compact and Provably Secure Mix Format"
- 15 June 2009: Aniket Kate, University of Waterloo
- "Distributed Key Generation for the Internet"
- 27 May 2009: Aniket Kate, University of Waterloo
- "Anonymous Key Agreement in an Identity-Based Infrastructure"
- 8 May 2009: Prof. Nikita Borisov, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
- "Peer-to-peer Anonymous Communication: Approaches and Pitfalls"
2008-2009 (MITACS Speaker Series on Privacy)
- 30 March 2009: Chris Alexander,
University of Waterloo
- "Plinko: Polling with a Physical Implementation of a Noisy
Channel"
- 23 February 2009: Jennifer Granick, Electronic Frontier Foundation
- "Cutting Edge Cases in Digital Privacy and Crime"
- 18 February 2009: Greg Zaverucha, University of Waterloo
- "Private Intersection of Certified Sets"
- 11 November 2008: Atefeh Mashatan, University of Waterloo
- "Message recognition protocols for ad hoc networks"
- 29 September 2008: Ontario Information and Privacy Commissioner Ann Cavoukian
- "Change the Paradigm: Embed Privacy into Technology and Ride the Next Wave"
A video of the talk is available.
- 18 September 2008: Joel Reardon, University of Waterloo
- "Improving Tor using a TCP-over-DTLS tunnel"
- 19 August, 2008: Kevin Henry, University of Waterloo
- "The theory and applications of homomorphic cryptography"
- 16 July 2008: Ge Zhong, University of Waterloo
- "Distributed approaches for location privacy"
- 9 July 2008: Ryan Stedman, University of Waterloo
- "A user study of Off-the-Record Messaging"
- 2 July 2008: Maura Paterson, Royal Holloway, University of London
- "Aspects of key management in wireless sensor networks"
- 9 June 2008: Chengxi Zhang, University of Waterloo
- "On achieving security and privacy preservation for vehicular
communications"
- 8 April 2008: Stefan Saroiu, University of Toronto
- "Towards eradicating phishing attacks"
