PETS Lecture 2023

Subject

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.

Content

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

Alike the past years there's a limit of 15 students who can participate in this course, as the reading group does not scale to larger groups.

Organizational Matters

The course will consist of a lecture (3SWS) and an exercise course (1SWS). 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.

Please register to the mailing list.
There will be an etherpad to organize the reading group, and there's a template to help you prepare.

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

Course Material

We will provide the course material throughout the term, to be up-to-date. Refer also to the nextcloud folder, for the most recent version of the slides. Dates are tentative

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 his or her 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.