Urs Hengartner
Assistant Professor
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
University of Waterloo
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3G1
Office: DC 3526
Phone: 519-888-4567 x36163
Fax: 519-885-1208
Email:
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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, delay-tolerant networks, and online voting. Some sample topics that I have worked on are:
- A location-based service allows a person to learn information that is relevant to her current location, such as nearby restaurants. However, considering that a person's location might allow conclusions about her interests or her activities, the person 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).
- Recently, social-networking applications have started to appear on mobile phones. These applications 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 the application provider (Software, pets-07).
- In developing regions, people often rely on public kiosks to access the Internet. Securing this access raises many challenges. For example, the employed hardware is often recycled, Internet access is only intermittent, and funds are limited. We have designed and implemented a security architecture that runs on constrained hardware and that is assembled entirely from open-source software (Website, nsdr-08, tech-report).
- Panic passwords allow a user to signal duress during authentication (e.g., in a home security system, at an ATM, or in online voting). We have studied different existing panic password schemes and introduced new schemes (hotsec-08).
I am also interested in access control, applied cryptography, location privacy, trust management, trusted computing, usability, and voting systems. My long-term research plan is the development of software techniques that increase the privacy of individuals who want to benefit from emerging services that manage or exploit personal information.
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 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).