Privacy Lab

We propose Cachet, a peer-to-peer social-network architecture that provides strong security and privacy guarantees. We leverage cryptographic techniques to protect the confidentiality of data, and design a hybrid structured-unstructured overlay paradigm where social contacts  act as trusted caches to help reduce the cryptographic as well as the communication overhead in the network. We presented our paper on Cachet at the 8th ACM International Conference on Emerging Networking Experiments and Technologies (CoNEXT) 2012. For more details, see the Cachet project page.

The Privacy Lab is led by Prof. Apu Kapadia in the School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering at Indiana University. Our goal is to advance research in computer security and privacy through a human centric approach. For an overview of our research, see our recent publications. Visit the People page to see the faces behind our research.

Some users may misbehave under the cover of anonymity by, e.g., defacing webpages on Wikipedia or posting vulgar comments on YouTube. To prevent such abuse, we have explored various anonymous credential schemes to revoke access for misbehaving users while maintaining their anonymity. Our latest scheme, PERM, supports millions of user sessions and makes ‘reputation-based blacklisting’ practical for large-scale deployments. Our paper on PERM was presented at the 19th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security. For more details see the accountable anonymity project page.