Urs Hengartner

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January 1, 2012:
I am on sabbatical at EPFL.

October 6, 2011:
Congratulations to my former PhD student Jeremy Clark for winning uWaterloo's 2011 Doctoral Alumni Gold medal for outstanding academic achievement.

May 30, 2011:
I have a postdoc position available.

Mai 19, 2011:
The Financial Post mentions our Google Focused Research Award.

Jan 19, 2011:
The Waterloo Region Record publishes my letter on paper ballots and voting machines.

Dec 31, 2010:
FaceCloak makes it to the Technology Spotlight 2010 of the Waterloo Region Record.

My research interests are in information privacy and in computer and networks security. In particular, I study security and privacy aspects of emerging mobile and distributed computing systems, such as location-based services, mobile social networking, and electronic voting. Some sample topics that I have worked on are:

Location proofs. Location-based services provide services to a person based on his location. But what if the person lies about his location to get unauthorized access? We have developed technologies that allow people to prove that they are at a location, but without becoming trackable (hotmobile-10, gis-10).
Location privacy. A location-based service allows a person to learn information that is relevant to her current location, such as nearby restaurants. However, considering that the person's location might allow conclusions about her interests or her activities, she could be reluctant to reveal her location to the location-based service. We have designed and implemented privacy-enhancing algorithms that allow a person to benefit from location-based services without forcing her to reveal detailed location information to a service (palms-07, securecomm-08, wpes-08, percom-09, pets-10).
Privacy for online social networking. Users of social networking sites, such as Facebook, need to trust a site to properly deal with their personal information. Unfortunately, this trust is not always justified. We have developed privacy-enhancing technologies that protect people's privacy while using an online social networking site (Software, passat-09).
Privacy for mobile social networking. Social-networking applications have started to appear on mobile phones, which exploit the phones' positioning capabilities to facilitate interaction between people. From a privacy point of view, this trend is troublesome, because it gives the provider of a social-networking application real-time access to people's location. We have designed and implemented privacy-enhancing technologies that allow location-sensitive interactions between people without requiring the continuous release of location information to application provider (Software, pets-07, pst-11).
Coercion resistance for end-to-end voter-verifiable voting systems. End-to-end voter-verifiable voting systems allow voters to verify that their votes were included in the final tally, without revealing which candidate they voted for. Coercion resistance is required to prevent vote buying and selling. We have studied coercion resistance in existing voter-verifiable voting systems and have developed a coercion-resistant voter-verifiable voting system for the Internet (hotsec-08, voteid-09, evt-10, fc-11).
Simpler end-to-end voter-verifiable voting systems. Most existing end-to-end voter-verifiable voting systems are understandable only to an expert audience. We have designed a new system that uses fewer and simpler cryptographic primitives (evt-2010, hotsec-09).

I am a member of the Cryptography, Security, and Privacy (CrySP) research group, the Centre for Applied Cryptographic Research, the Networks and Distributed Systems Group, and the HCI Group.

I am involved with the Digital Media Enabling Technologies project.

I completed my Ph.D. in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon in August 2005. Prior to that, I received an M.S. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon and a Dipl. Informatik-Ing. ETH from ETH Zürich (Curriculum Vitae).

My research is supported by NSERC and Google.

Urs Hengartner

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