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White Paper & Bio
Data confidentiality is frequently a barrier for collaborative distributed
applications, as frequently the data that an individual or an organization
might contribute to a collaborative task is sensitive and cannot be
easily shared. Privacy-preserving techniques that either transform
the data or perform a cryptographic computation between parties can
serve to enable collaborative applications despite these barriers.
However, there are several remaining challenges in using such techniques
in practice. The first is knowing when the privacy-preserving techniques
have removed enough information. Though it may be easy to describe
what information is revealed and what is kept secret by a particular
scheme, the privacy value of confidential data is difficult to evaluate,
as new ways to infer confidential information from seemingly innocuous
data are demonstrated all the time. Another question is verifying
the validity of shared data -- always a difficult question, but made
more difficult by the fact that the data is obfuscated or perhaps
not shared at all. Finally, privacy-preserving techniques by necessity
remove some patterns from the data, and hence an important question
is how to ensure that the data still remain useful for a particular
application. Our understanding of both the privacy constraints on
shared data and the functionality needs of applications will evolve
with both developments in technology and changing social values. The
research challenge is to develop privacy-preserving techniques that
can adapt to an evolving set of constraints on privacy and functionality,
and at the same time provide a way to guarantee integrity. A broader
challenge, both for the research community and for industry, is broader
deployment of privacy-preserving techniques and other privacy enhancing
technologies in business. Recent history is replete of examples of
data disclosures that resulted from lost computers, stolen media,
compromised servers, or insider attacks. These disclosures show that
internal policies for safeguarding data are not sufficient without
a technical backing, and that privacy enhancing technologies can be
useful within an organization, rather than among mutually distrusting
parties. They can be used to create a need-to-know data environment,
mitigating the effects of a loss or compromise of computers.
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Nikita Borisov
University
of Illinois
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Biographical Data
Nikita Borisov is an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign. He received his Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley in
2005. His research interests are in the are of privacy enhancing
technologies, including anonymous communication and privacy-preserving
distributed collaborative applications. Prof. Borisov serves as
program co-chair of the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium
in 2007 and 2008.
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