Abstract: This talk will explore Dr Elahi’s work on defending private communication systems from attackers (both state and criminal). We will discuss the impact and mitigations of adversarial resource injection, weaponization of software bugs, and the comingling of client-side surveillance and end-to-end-encryption on social media platforms. We will touch on the current governance challenges in privacy projects, the need for incentives for operating privacy infrastructure, and technological silver bullets.

Bio: Tariq received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo and was fortunate to have Ian Goldberg as his supervisor. His thesis centered on censorship resistance systems and analyses of their security and privacy properties. He received his MSc from Royal Holloway - University of London under the supervision of Kenny Paterson where he investigated anonymous communications and file sharing systems. He researches computer and network security and privacy enhancing technologies (PETs) with an emphasis on effective, efficient, and robust deployments. His research has, and continues to, span the systematization and the game-theoretic analysis of censorship resistance and circumvention systems, security analysis and designs of anonymous communication systems, and privacy-preserving data collection in privacy-sensitive scenarios. He is interested in novel applications and enhancements to PETs techniques and strategies to exotic environments, such as Smart Cities where standard trust and availability assumptions need not apply.