Femi OlumofinPhD Candidate David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science University of Waterloo 200 University Avenue West Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3G1 Office: DC 3332 Email: Phone: 519-888-4567 x31337 |
Update: I have graduated!
I am a PhD Candidate in the Cryptography, Security and Privacy Research Group. My supervisor is Ian Goldberg.
Research Interests
I have broad research interest in many areas of computer security and information privacy, including privacy-preserving queries over the Internet, mobile computing and location privacy, cloud computing security and privacy, privacy-preserving online behavioural advertising, and onion routing.
Representative Publications
Ryan Henry, Femi Olumofin, and Ian Goldberg, "Practical PIR for Electronic Commerce", Eighteenth ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, Chicago, IL, October 2011.
- Provided an extension to Goldberg's multi-server information theoretic private information retrieval (PIR) scheme to support privacy-preserving online sales of digital goods, while preserving the sublinear communication complexity of PIR. Our motivating examples include a pay-per-download music store where users must pay for each song they download, a phone app store (e.g., Android Market), and an e-book store (e.g., Amazon Kindle). We have implemented and evaluated our extension atop Percy++, an open-source implementation of Goldberg's PIR scheme. Our measurements indicate the performance of our schemes is reasonable, making them acceptable for deployment in real-world e-commerce systems.
Prateek Mittal, Femi Olumofin, Carmela Troncoso, Nikita Borisov, and Ian Goldberg, "PIR-Tor: Scalable Anonymous Communication Using Private Information Retrieval", Twentieth USENIX Security Symposium, San Francisco, CA, August 2011.
- Proposed PIR-Tor as a scalable architecture for the Tor network. In PIR-Tor, clients construct routes for anonymous communication by using PIR to obtain information about a few relays from one or more directory servers. PIR-Tor frees Tor clients from maintaining a global view of available relays in the network, prevents compromised directory servers from learning the choices of relays used for route construction, and reduces the overall communication by at least an order of magnitude.
Femi Olumofin, and Ian Goldberg, "Revisiting the Computational Practicality of Private Information Retrieval", Fifteenth International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security, Saint Lucia, February 2011.
- Extended and clarified the result from a 2007 paper on the computational practicality of PIR by Sion and Carbunar for multi-server PIR schemes and single-server PIR schemes that do not rely heavily on number theory (i.e., lattice-based schemes). Using analytical and experimental techniques, we found the end-to-end response times of these schemes to be one to three orders of magnitude (10 – 1000 times) smaller than trivially downloading the PIR database for realistic computation power and network bandwidth.
Femi Olumofin, and Ian Goldberg, "Privacy-preserving Queries over Relational Databases", Tenth Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium, Berlin, Germany, July 2010.
- Explored keeping sensitive information contained in an SQL query from being leaked using PIR. Paper shows how to retrieve data from a relational database with PIR by hiding sensitive constants contained in the predicates of a query. Experimental results and microbenchmarking tests show the approach incurs reasonable storage overhead for the added privacy benefit and performs between 7 and 480 times faster than previous work.
Femi Olumofin, Piotr K. Tysowski, Ian Goldberg, and Urs Hengartner, "Achieving Efficient Query Privacy for Location Based Services", Tenth Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium, Berlin, Germany, July 2010.
- Proposed an algorithm for PIR that achieves a good compromise between user location privacy and computational efficiency for resource-constrained hardware. The approach uses variable-sized cloaking region divided into Various-size-grid Hilbert Curve (VHC) cells for greater location privacy than the traditional approach of a single cloaking region, while at the same time decreasing wireless data traffic usage from an amount proportional to the size of the cloaking region to an amount proportional to the size of a VHC cell.
Teaching
Previous courses:- Data Structures & Algorithms (second year), University of Manitoba (online course) – Winter & Summer 2008
- Data Structures & Algorithms (second year), University of Manitoba (in-class course) – Summer 2007
Research Affiliations
- Cryptography, Security, and Privacy (CrySP) research group
- Centre for Applied Cryptographic Research (CACR)
Awards
- UW Special Graduate Scholarship, 2011
- Research In Motion Graduate Scholarship, 2010
- NSERC Postgraduate Scholarship - Doctoral, 2008 – 2010
- President's Graduate Scholarship, 2008 – 2010
- University of Manitoba Graduate Fellowship, 2007 – 2008
- Manitoba Graduate Scholarship, 2007 – 2008
- University of Manitoba UMSU Award, 2007
- Faculty of Science Award, 2005
Miscellaneous
I will be graduating by the end of the Spring 2011 term. Previously, I studied Computer Science at the University of Manitoba (M.Sc.), and the University of Benin (B.Sc.). Prior to graduate studies, I spent some years doing software development and consulting. I moved to Waterloo from Winnipeg on August 2008. At the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, my supervisor was Vojislav B. Mišić.