Publications

Pre-prints

• Bugs in our Pockets: The Risks of Client-Side Scanning. Hal Abelson, Ross Anderson, Steven M Bellovin, Josh Benaloh, Matt Blaze, Jon Callas, Whitfield Diffie, Susan Landau, Peter G Neumann, Ronald L Rivest, Jeffrey I Schiller, Bruce Schneier, Vanessa Teague, Carmela Troncoso. 2021
• Preliminary Analysis of Potential Harms in the Luca Tracing System. Theresa Stadler, Wouter Lueks, Katharina Kohls, Carmela Troncoso. 2021.
• Privacy Engineering Meets Software Engineering. On the Challenges of Engineering Privacy ByDesign. Blagovesta Kostova, Seda Gürses, Wouter Lueks, Carmela Troncoso. 2021.
• Decentralized Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing.Carmela Troncoso, Mathias Payer, Jean-Pierre Hubaux, Marcel Salathé, James Larus, Edouard Bugnion, Wouter Lueks, Theresa Stadler, Apostolos Pyrgelis, Daniele Antonioli, Ludovic Barman, Sylvain Chatel, Kenneth Paterson, Srdjan Capkun, David Basin, Jan Beutel, Dennis Jackson, Marc Roeschlin, Patrick Leu, Bart Preneel, Nigel Smart, Aysajan Abidin, Seda Gürses, Michael Veale, Cas Cremers, Michael Backes, Nils Ole Tippenhauer, Reuben Binns, Ciro Cattuto, Alain Barrat, Dario Fiore, Manuel Barbosa, Rui Oliveira, José Pereira. 2020.
• The Bayes Security Measure.Konstantinos Chatzikokolakis, Giovanni Cherubin, Catuscia Palamidessi, Carmela Troncoso. 2020.
• Evading classifiers in discrete domains with provable optimality guarantees (long version). Bogdan Kulynych, Jamie Hayes, Nikita Samarin, Carmela Troncoso. 2019.

2023

• The Bayes Security Measure. Konstantinos Chatzikokolakis, Giovanni Cherubin, Catuscia Palamidessi, and Carmela Troncoso. CSF 23.

2022

• Synthetic Data – Anonymisation Groundhog Day. Theresa Stadler, Bristena Oprisanu, and Carmela Troncoso. USENIX Security 22.
• WebGraph: Capturing Advertising and Tracking Information Flows for Robust Blocking. Sandra Siby, Umar Iqbal, Steven Englehardt, Zubair Shafiq, and Carmela Troncoso. USENIX Security 22.
• Online Website Fingerprinting: Evaluating Website Fingerprinting Attacks on Tor in the Real World. Giovanni Cherubin, Rob Jansen, Carmela Troncoso. USENIX Security 22.
Award Usenix Security Distinguished Paper Award
Award Second Prize Winner (tie) of the 2022 Internet Defense Prize
• Disparate Vulnerability to Membership Inference Attacks. Bogdan Kulynych, Mohammad Yaghini, Giovanni Cherubin, Michael Veale, Carmela Troncoso. PoPETS 2022.

2021

• Toward a Common Performance and Effectiveness Terminology for Digital Proximity Tracing Applications. Wouter Lueks, Justus Benzler, Dan Bogdanov, Göran Kirchner, Raquel Lucas, Rui Oliveira, Bart Preneel, Marcel Salathé, Carmela Troncoso, and Viktor von Wyl. Frontiers Digit. Health. 2021.
• CrowdNotifier: Decentralized Privacy-Preserving Presence Tracing. Wouter Lueks, Seda Gürses, Michael Veale, Edouard Bugnion, Marcel Salathé, Kenny G. Paterson, and Carmela Troncoso. PoPETs 2021.

2020

• Early Evidence of Effectiveness of Digital Contact Tracing for SARS-CoV-2 in Switzerland. Marcel Salathé, Christian L. Althaus, Nanina Anderegg, Daniele Antonioli, Tala Ballouz, Edouard Bugnion, Srdjan Capkun, Dennis Jackson, Sang-Il Kim, James R. Larus, Nicola Low, Wouter Lueks, Dominik Menges, Cédric Moullet, Mathias Payer, Julien Riou, Theresa Stadler, Carmela Troncoso, Effy Vayena, Viktor von Wyl. Swiss Medical Weekly
• A research agenda for digital proximity tracing apps. Viktor von Wyl, Sebastian Bonhoeffer, Edouard Bugnion, Alan Puhan Milo, Marcel Salathé, Theresa Stadler, Carmela Troncoso, Effy Vayena, Nicola Low. Swiss Medical Weekly
• Datashare Network: A Decentralized Privacy-Preserving Search Engine for Investigative Journalists. Kasra EdalatNejad, Wouter Lueks, Julien Pierre Martin, Soline Ledésert, Anne L'Hôte, Bruno Thomas, Laurent Girod, Carmela Troncoso. Usenix Security 2020.
Runner-up 2021 Caspar Bowden Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies
Runner-up 2022 CNIL Privacy Protection Award
• GenoShare: Supporting Privacy-Informed Decisions for Sharing Individual-Level Genetic Data.
Jean Louis Raisaro, Juan Ramón Troncoso-Pastoriza, Yamane El-Zein, Mathias Humbert, Carmela Troncoso, Jacques Fellay, Jean-Pierre Hubaux. MIE 2020.
• VoteAgain: A scalable coercion-resistant voting system. Wouter Lueks, Iñigo Querejeta-Azurmendi, Carmela Troncoso. Usenix Security 2020.
• Measuring Membership Privacy on Aggregate Location Time-Series. Apostolos Pyrgelis, Carmela Troncoso, and Emiliano De Cristofaro. SIGMETRICS 2020.
• POTs: Protective Optimization Technologies. Bogdan Kulynych, Rebekah Overdorf, Carmela Troncoso, Seda Gürses. FAT* 2020.
• Encrypted DNS --> Privacy? A Traffic Analysis Perspective. Sandra Siby, Marc Juarez, Claudia Diaz, Narseo Vallina-Rodriguez, Carmela Troncoso. NDSS 2020.
  Blog post: Does DoH imply privacy
  Slides presented by Sandra at the IETF 105 meeting: Traffic analyis of encrypted DoH
• Tandem: Securing Keys by Using a Central Server While Preserving Privacy. Wouter Lueks, Brinda Hampiholi, Greg Alpár, Carmela Troncoso. PoPETS 2020.
• Angel or Devil? A Privacy Study of Mobile Parental Control Apps Álvaro Feal, Paolo Calciati, Narseo Vallina-Rodriguez, Carmela Troncoso, Alessandra Gorla. PoPETs 2020
Award Emilio Aced Award

2019

• zksk: A Library for Composable Zero-Knowledge Proofs. Wouter Lueks, Bogdan Kulynych, Jules Fasquelle, Simon Le Bail-Collet, Carmela Troncoso. WPES 2019
• On (The Lack Of) Location Privacy in Crowdsourcing Applications. Spyros Boukoros, Mathias Humbert, Stefan Katzenbeisser, Carmela Troncoso. Usenix Security 2019.
• Rethinking Location Privacy for Unknown Mobility Behaviors. Simon Oya, Carmela Troncoso, Fernando Pérez-González. EuroS&P 2019
• Lightnion: seamless anonymous communication from any web browser. Wouter Lueks, Matthieu Daumas, Carmela Troncoso. Workshop on Measurements, Attacks and Defenses for the Web (MADWeb) 2019.
  Code: . Give it a try!

2018

• Evading classifiers in discrete domains with provable optimality guarantees .Bogdan Kulynych, Jamie Hayes, Nikita Samarin, Carmela Troncoso. NeurIPS 2018 Workshop on Security in Machine Learning.
• Questioning the assumptions behind fairness solutions. Rebekah Overdorf, Bogdan Kulynych, Ero Balsa, Carmela Troncoso, Seda Gürses. Critiquing and Correcting Trends in Machine Learning 2018.
  Blog post: Questioning the assumptions behind fairness solutions
• ClaimChain: Improving the Security and Privacy of In-band Key Distribution for Messaging. Bogdan Kulynych, Wouter Lueks, Marios Isaakidis, George Danezis, and Carmela Troncoso. WPES 2018. [Project web]
  ClaimChains are being tested by the the Autocrypt email encryption initiative
• DNS Privacy not so private: the traffic analysis perspective. Sandra Siby, Marc Juarez, Narseo Vallina, and Carmela Troncoso. HotPETS 2018.
• TARANET: Traffic-Analysis Resistant Anonymity at the NETwork layer. Chen Chen , Daniele E. Asoni, Adrian Perrig, David Barrera, George Danezis, and Carmela Troncoso. IEEE EuroS&P 2018.
• Knock Knock, Who's There? Membership Inference on Aggregate Location Data. Apostolos Pyrgelis, Carmela Troncoso, and Emiliano De Cristofaro. NDSS 2018.
Award Distinguished Paper Award at NDSS18
Runner-up 2019 CNIL Privacy Protection Award

2017

• Feature importance scores and lossless feature pruning using Banzhaf power indices. Bogdan Kulynych and Carmela Troncoso. NIPS 2017 Symposium on Interpretable Machine Learning.
• Modern key distribution with ClaimChain. Bogdan Kulynych, Marios Isaakidis, Carmela Troncoso, and Geore Danezis. 34c3: 34th Chaos Communication Congress 2017. Talk video]
• Back to the Drawing Board: Revisiting the Design of Optimal Location Privacy-preserving Mechanisms. Simon Oya, Carmela Troncoso, and Fernando Pérez-González. CCS 2017. [code]
• Is Geo-Indistinguishability What You Are Looking for?. Simon Oya, Carmela Troncoso, and Fernando Pérez-González. WPES 2017.
• What Does The Crowd Say About You? Evaluating Aggregation-based Location Privacy. Apostolos Pyrgelis, Carmela Troncoso, and Emiliano De Cristofaro. PoPETS 2017.
• Systematizing Decentralization and Privacy: Lessons from 15 years of research and deployments. Carmela Troncoso, Marios Isaakidis, George Danezis, and Harry Halpin. PoPETS 2017.
• Small Data. Oliver Kennedy, D. Richard Hipp, Stratos Idreos, Amélie Marian, Arnab Nandi, Carmela Troncoso, and Eugene Wu. ICDE 2017.
• Dissecting Tor Bridges: a Security Evaluation of their Private and Public Infrastructures. Srdjan Matic, Carmela Troncoso, and Juan Caballero. NDSS 2017.
• Filter design for delay-based anonymous communications. Simon Oya, Fernando Pérez-González, and Carmela Troncoso. ICASSP 2017.

2016

• TASP: Towards Anonymity Sets that Persist. Jamie Hayes, Carmela Troncosom and George Danezis. WPES 2016.
• Privacy Games Along Location Traces: A Game-Theoretic Framework for Optimizing Location Privacy. Reza Shokri, George Theodorakopoulos, and Carmela Troncoso. ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security (TOPS) 2016.
• Design of Pool Mixes Against Profiling Attacks in Real Conditions. Simon Oya, Fernando Pérez-González, and Carmela Troncoso. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking. 2016

2015

• Engineering Privacy by Design Reloaded. Seda Gürses, Carmela Troncoso, and Claudia Diaz. Amsterdam Privacy Conference. 2015
Award CNIL/INRIA Award for Privacy Protection

2014

• A Least Squares Approach to the Static Traffic Analysis of High-Latency Anonymous Communication Systems. Fernando Pérez-González, Carmela Troncoso, Simon Oya. IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security 9(9). 2014
• Do Dummies Pay Off? Limits of Dummy Traffic Protection in Anonymous Communications. Simon Oya, Carmela Troncoso, Fernando Pérez-González. Privacy Enhancing Technologies 2014.
• Understanding the effects of real-world behavior in statistical disclosure attacks. Simon Oya, Carmela Troncoso, Fernando Pérez-González. WIFS 2014.
• Prolonging the Hide-and-Seek Game. Optimal Trajectory Privacy for Location-Based Services. George Theodorakopoulos, Reza Shokri, Carmela Troncoso, Jean-Pierre Hubaux, Jean-Yves Le Boudec. WPES 2014.

2013

• Meet the family of statistical disclosure attacks. Simon Oya, Carmela Troncoso, Fernando Pérez-González. GlobalSIP 2013.
• Bayesian inference to evaluate information leakage in complex scenarios (Keynote talk). Carmela Troncoso. IH&MMSec 2013. [Slides]
• The watchful forensic analyst. Multi-clue information fusion with background knowledge. Marco Fontani, Enrique Argones-Rúa, Carmela Troncoso, Mauro Barni. WIFS 2013.
• You cannot hide for long. de-anonymization of real-world dynamic behaviour. George Danezis, Carmela Troncoso. WPES 2013. [Slides]
• Optimal sporadic location privacy preserving systems in presence of bandwidth constraints. Michael Herrmann, Carmela Troncoso, Claudia Díaz, Bart Preneel. WPES 2013.

2012

• A Metric to Evaluate Interaction Obfuscation in Online Social Networks. Ero Balsa, Carmela Troncoso, Claudia Díaz. International Journal of Uncertainty, Fuzziness and Knowledge-Based Systems 20(6). 2012
• Protecting location privacy. optimal strategy against localization attacks. Reza Shokri, George Theodorakopoulos, Carmela Troncoso, Jean-Pierre Hubaux, Jean-Yves Le Boudec. CCS 2012.
• Understanding Statistical Disclosure. A Least Squares Approach. Fernando Pérez-González, Carmela Troncoso. Privacy Enhancing Technologies 2012.
• OB-PWS. Obfuscation-Based Private Web Search. Ero Balsa, Carmela Troncoso, Claudia Díaz. IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy 2012.
• A Least Squares approach to user profiling in pool mix-based anonymous communication systems. Fernando Pérez-González, Carmela Troncoso. WIFS 2012.

2011

• Design and Analysis methods for Privacy Technologies. Carmela Troncoso. PhD thesis, KULeuven, C. Diaz, and B. Preneel (advisors). 2011 [Slides]
  Award ERCIM WG STM Best Ph.D. Thesis Award 2011
  Award Summa cum laude with the congratulations of the board of examiners (only awarded in exceptional circumstances, at most 5% of the doctorates in engineering at K.U.Leuven)
• Engineering Privacy by Design. Seda Gürses, Carmela Troncoso, and Claudia Diaz. Computers, Privacy & Data Protection (CPDP). 2011
• On the difficulty of achieving anonymity for Vehicle-2-X communication. Carmela Troncoso, Enrique Costa-Montenegro, Claudia Díaz, Stefan Schiffner. Computer Networks 55(14). 2011
• PriPAYD. Privacy-Friendly Pay-As-You-Drive Insurance. Carmela Troncoso, George Danezis, Eleni Kosta, Josep Balasch, Bart Preneel. IEEE Trans. Dependable Sec. Comput. 8(5). 2011
• PIR-Tor. Scalable Anonymous Communication Using Private Information Retrieval. Prateek Mittal, Femi G. Olumofin, Carmela Troncoso, Nikita Borisov, Ian Goldberg. USENIX Security Symposium 2011
• Fingerprinting Tor's hidden service log files using a timing channel. Juan A. Elices, Fernando Pérez-González, Carmela Troncoso. WIFS 2011.
  Award Gold Award to Best Student Paper.

2010

• Impact of Network Topology on Anonymity and Overhead in Low-Latency Anonymity Networks. Claudia Díaz, Steven J. Murdoch, Carmela Troncoso. Privacy Enhancing Technologies 2010.
• Drac. An Architecture for Anonymous Low-Volume Communications. George Danezis, Claudia Díaz, Carmela Troncoso, Ben Laurie. Privacy Enhancing Technologies 2010. [Slides]
• PrETP. Privacy-Preserving Electronic Toll Pricing. Josep Balasch, Alfredo Rial, Carmela Troncoso, Bart Preneel, Ingrid Verbauwhede, Christophe Geuens. USENIX Security Symposium 2010.
• Scalable Anonymous Communication with Provable Security. Prateek Mittal, Nikita Borisov, Carmela Troncoso, Alfredo Rial. HotSec 2010
• Unraveling an old cloak. k-anonymity for location privacy. Reza Shokri, Carmela Troncoso, Claudia Díaz, Julien Freudiger, Jean-Pierre Hubaux. WPES 2010.

2009

• The bayesian traffic analysis of mix networks. Carmela Troncoso, George Danezis. ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security 2009. [Slides, see also extended version]
• The Wisdom of Crowds. Attacks and Optimal Constructions. George Danezis, Claudia Díaz, Emilia Käsper, Carmela Troncoso. ESORICS 2009.
• Vida. How to Use Bayesian Inference to De-anonymize Persistent Communications. George Danezis, Carmela Troncoso. Privacy Enhancing Technologies 2009. [Slides]

2008

• A Framework for the Analysis of Mix-Based Steganographic File Systems. Claudia Díaz, Carmela Troncoso, Bart Preneel. ESORICS 2008.
• Perfect Matching Disclosure Attacks. Carmela Troncoso, Benedikt Gierlichs, Bart Preneel, Ingrid Verbauwhede. Privacy Enhancing Technologies 2008. [Slides]
• On the Impact of Social Network Profiling on Anonymity. Claudia Díaz, Carmela Troncoso, Andrei Serjantov. Privacy Enhancing Technologies 2008.
• Improving secure long-term archival of digitally signed documents. Carmela Troncoso, Danny De Cock, Bart Preneel. StorageSS 2008. [Slides]
• Revisiting a combinatorial approach toward measuring anonymity. Benedikt Gierlichs, Carmela Troncoso, Claudia Díaz, Bart Preneel, Ingrid Verbauwhede. WPES 2008.

2007

• Traffic Analysis Attacks on a Continuously-Observable Steganographic File System. Carmela Troncoso, Claudia Díaz, Orr Dunkelman, Bart Preneel. Information Hiding 2007. [Slides]
• Efficient Negative Databases from Cryptographic Hash Functions. George Danezis, Claudia Díaz, Sebastian Faust, Emilia Käsper, Carmela Troncoso, Bart Preneel. ISC 2007.
• Two-Sided Statistical Disclosure Attacks. George Danezis, Claudia Díaz, Carmela Troncoso. Privacy Enhancing Technologies 2007. [Slides]
• Does additional information always reduce anonymity? Claudia Díaz, Carmela Troncoso, George Danezis. WPES 2007.
• PriPAYD. privacy friendly pay-as-you-drive insurance. Carmela Troncoso, George Danezis, Eleni Kosta, Bart Preneel. WPES 2007. [Slides]

Talks

2021

• Designing Technology in Pandemic times. Invited talk at CSF 21. Online. June 2021. [video ]
• Contact Tracing Apps: Engineering Privacy in Quicksand. Invited talk at Usenix Enigma 21. Online. February 2021. [video ]
• Privacy by Design -- From Theory to Practice in the Context of COVID-19 Contact Tracing. Invited talk at Real World Crypto 21. Online. January 2021. [video ]



2020

• Engineering Privacy in Contact Tracing Apps. Invited talk at Indocrypt 2020. Online. December 2020.[video ]



2019

• PETs, POTs, and Pitfalls: Rethinking the Protection of Users against Machine Learning. Keynote at ScAINet 19. Santa Clara, US. August 2019.
• Privacy technologies need to go to the gym: on the challenges of privacy engineering in an Agile world. Keynote at IWPE19. San Francisco, US. May 2019.



2018

• What does the crowd say about you? Privacy issues in aggregate location data. Invited talk at UCSD. San Diego, US. February 2018.
• Anonymous communications (a crash course in 7 minutes). Panel "Anonymous Communications infrastructures for the protection of metadata" at Computers Privacy and Data Protection. Brussels, Belgium. January 2018.



2017

• Systematic Privacy by Design engineering. Talk at ISSS EU-Datenschutzgrundverordnung und nues CH-DSG. Zurich (Switzerland). June 2017.
• Dissecting Tor Bridges: a Security Evaluation of their Private and Public Infrastructures. Talk at School of Computer Science and Statistics at Trinity College. Dublin (Ireland). March 2017.
• Privacy-preserving systems: Systematic reasoning for design and evaluation. Talk at 2nd INTERPOL Workshop on Privacy Enhancing Technologies. Lyon (France). January 2017.



2016

• Systematic design of privacy-preserving systems: are we there yet?. Talk at ZISC Workshop 2016: Big Data Security and Privacy. Zurich (Switzerland). September 2016.
• Introduction to Privacy. Lecture at Intensive Programme on Information and Communication Systems Security (IPICS 2016). Leuven (Belgium). July 2016.
• Traffic analysis: or... encryption is not enough. Lecture at Summer Research Institute. Security/Privacy Edition. Laussane (Switzerland). June 2016.
• Privacy by Design Reloaded. Talk at Jornadas Nacionales de Investigación en Ciberseguridad. Granada (Spain). June 2016.
• Traffic analysis: or... encryption is not enough. Lecture at Summer school on real-world crypto and privacy. Sibenik (Croatia). June 2016.
• Seeing Privacy Enhancing Technologies as Business Enabling Technologies. Panel at Computers Privacy and Data Protection. Brussels, Belgium. January 2016. [video ]



2015

• Privacy-preserving Smart City: utopia or reality?. Panel at Smart City Expo World Congress. Barcelona, Spain. November 2015. [video ]
• Privacy by Design: A technical perspective. Briefing talk at PRIPARE Training for European commission Project Officers on Privacy by Design. Brussels, Belgium. June 2015.
• Privacy Enhancing Technologies. Lecture at PRIPARE Workshop on Privacy by Design. Ulm, Germany. March 2015.
• Big Data and Privacy: is it possible?. Talk at Trust in the Digital World. Madrid, Spain. February 2015.
• Privacy in Computer Science Education: What I miss in Engineers know-how. Panel at Computers Privacy and Data Protection. Brussels, Belgium. January 2015. [video ]



2014

• Bayesian Inference to Evaluate Information Leakage in Complex Scenarios. Invited talk at EC SPRIDE-Colloquium on Privacy and Security By Design. Darmstadt, Germany. June 2014.
• Privacy-preserving Biometrics in practice: difficult to sell. Panel talk at Computers Privacy and Data Protection. Brussels, Belgium. January 2014.

2012

• Design and analysis methods for privacy technologies. Invited Talk. 8th International Workshop on Security and Trust Management (STM 2012), Pisa. September 13th 2012.



2009

• The Bayesian Analysis of Mix Networks. Invited talk (University of Texas at Arlington). November 16th 2009.
• Pay as you Drive Applications. Privacy implications and possible solutions. TSS Seminar. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana-Champaign. November 3rd 2009.