PETS Lecture 2025

This course will provide students with a basic understanding of privacy risks and the most common technologies to tackle them. The course will analyze the adversary models and evaluation metrics underlying the design of privacy-enhancing technologies.

Organizational matters

The lecture is going to be given in English (questions, discussions and one of the reading groups can be organized in German on demand).

Alike the past years, there's a limit of 20 students who can participate in this course, as the reading group does not scale to larger groups.

To register, you must join the ILIAS course linked above. Slots are handed out on a first-come-first-served basis, with a waiting list in case students drop out again.

The course will consist of a lecture (3 SWS) and an exercise course (1 SWS). The exercise course consists of two parts: we will hold a biweekly reading group and there will be a task assignment. We will read papers from the context of the topics in class in the reading group. Everybody is expected to read all mandatory papers (around 9), and we will choose volunteers for each paper to briefly summarize the content, before the entire group discusses their questions and comments regarding the paper. We hope to discuss two papers during each session. The implementation task will be introduced in the context of the class discussing database publication and differential privacy. Each participant of the course will be tasked to implement a simple solution for data sharing with differential privacy, and the results will be presented and discussed during the last exercise course.

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Syllabus

• Module 1 - Introduction to the course (organizational)
• Module 2 - General background, ethical/legal foundations, and basic notions of privacy
• Module 3 - Privacy metrics
• Module 4 - Statistical disclosure control and database anonymization
• Module 5 - Differential privacy
• Module 6 - Anonymous communication
• Module 7 - Anonymous credentials
• Module 8 - Location and trajectory privacy

Reading group

The exercise part of the course is a 1 SWS reading group. You will find a list of papers as soon as we know the exact number of participants below. You will have the first month of the term to start reading the papers, and we will have weekly reading groups in the second half of the term. Each student will be expected to introduce one paper of their choice (see link to etherpad above, it may help to organize and avoid surprises). In each reading group a student can volunteer, or one student will be selected by random choice.