Privacy Enhancing Technologies

Abstract

As the amount and the sensitivity of information disseminated in the online world grow, so do related privacy concerns. Extensive surveillance and massive tracking of users on the Web are only some of the threats to individual privacy. In the big data era, information increasingly equals power and money, and organizations are thus motivated to collect and retain large quantities of personal and, increasingly, contextual information. These concerns motivate the need for privacy-enhancing technologies, such as data protection, anonymity networks, decentralization, zero-knowledge, and secure computation, by which individuals can achieve privacy in the online world. The 13th Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS 2013) brought together privacy and anonymity experts from around the world to discuss recent advances and new perspectives. It fostered novel research efforts toward designing and building systems for privacy and anonymity protection as well as analyzing challenges and threats. There were 69 papers submitted to PETS 2013, and each received an average of 4.33 reviews from the 43 members of the Program Committee (PC). Following an intensive discussion among the reviewers and other PC members, 13 papers were accepted for presentation. Topics addressed by the papers published in these proceedings include data privacy, privacy-oriented cryptography, location privacy, performance of the Tor network, censorship evasion, traffic analysis, and user-related privacy perspectives. Compared to recent PETS editions, the number of PC members was increased to accommodate a broader range of expertise, deliver a greater number of reviews, and involve a wider representation of both senior and junior researchers. We maintained the tradition of dedicating one day of PETS to the Workshop on Hot Topics on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (HotPETs), at which participants discussed exciting though possibly preliminary ideas. HotPETs 2013 included a keynote talk by Helen Nissenbaum of New York University. As with the previous five HotPETs editions, there are no published proceedings for HotPETs, except on the dark side of the moon. PETS 2013 also included a keynote talk by Lorrie Cranor of Carnegie Mellon University, a rump session with brief presentations on a variety of topics, and two panels. We would like to thank all PETS and HotPETs authors, especially those who presented their work that was selected for the program, as well as keynote speakers, panelists, and rump session presenters. We are very grateful to the PC members and additional reviewers, who contributed to editorial decisions with thorough reviews and actively participated in the PC discussions, ensuring a high quality of all accepted papers. We owe special thanks to the following PC members and reviewers who volunteered to shepherd some of the accepted papers: Damon McCoy, Michael Hay, Jim Graves, Eugene Vasserman, Roger Dingledine, Julien Freudiger, Srdjan Capkun, Elaine Shi, and Alexei Czeskis. We gratefully acknowledge the outstanding contributions of the PETS 2013 General Chair, XiaoFeng Wang, the members of the Local Arrangements Committee, Apu Kapadia, Raquel Hill, and Haixu Tang, as well as our webmaster of seven years, Jeremy Clark. Moreover, our gratitude goes to the HotPETs 2013 Chairs, Prateek Mittal and Reza Shokri, who put together an excellent program. Last but not least, we would like to thank our sponsors, the Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing and Center for Security Informatics, the Indiana University Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research, and the Indiana University Pervasive Technology Institute, for their generous support, as well as Microsoft for its continued sponsorship with travel stipends.