Entries for June 2014

PhD Studentship in Privacy-friendly Computation

10 June 2014

PhD Supervisor: Dr G Danezis
Application Deadline: Friday, June 27, 2014

Applications are invited for a PhD position in the field of privacy enhancing technologies and cryptographic engineering at the Information Security Group of the UCL Department of Computer Science. The position is funded partly by Microsoft Research (MSR) and will be co-supervised by an MSR researcher.

We expect a candidate to have at least a strong 2:1 degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics or a related MSc course. A good engineering mathematics background and a willingness to become fluent with modern cryptographic constructions are necessary. A solid software engineering, compilers, or distributed systems background is desirable.

The successful applicant will study the engineering of tools and services to enable the wide deployment of privacy friendly computation techniques. A number of techniques in theoretical cryptography allow for computations to be performed on encrypted or otherwise obscured private data (including homomorphic encryption, secure multi-party computation and zero-knowledge proofs). The aim of this project is to make those techniques practical and usable by non-cryptographers. Key challenges include a thorough understanding of the cryptographic primitives, but most importantly engineering innovation through the creation of both infrastructures (web services, trusted parties) and tools (compilers, libraries, languages) that implement the theoretical techniques, and provide a usable interface for non-experts to use them.

How to Apply:

Please follow the link to the online application form here: https://prism.ucl.ac.uk/pgadmissions/apply/new?advert=66
You should mark the name of the studentship clearly on your personal statement.
The vacancy closing date is the 27th June 2014.
General enquiries about the application process should be directed to Melanie Johnson at melanie.johnson@ucl.ac.uk.
Questions regarding academic aspects of the project should be directed to George Danezis at g.danezis@ucl.ac.uk.

Funding Notes:

The studentship is open to all but only fully covers UK/EU fees. In addition a tax free stipend of £15,863 per year is provided.

Post tagged as: computation, phd, privacy.

Call for Papers: eCrime 2014

05 June 2014

The ninth Symposium on Electronic Crime Research (eCrime) 2014 once again will be held in conjunction with the 2014 APWG General Meeting between September 23-25, 2014 in Birmingham, Alabama.

eCrime 2014 consist of two full days which bring together academic researchers, security practitioners, and law enforcement to discuss all aspects of electronic crime and ways to combat it. Topics of interests include (but are not limited to):

Case studies of current attack methods, including phishing, malware, rogue antivirus, pharming, crimeware, botnets, and emerging techniques
Case studies of online advertising fraud, including click fraud, malvertising, cookie stuffing, and affiliate fraud
Case studies of large-scale take-downs, such as coordinated botnet disruption
Technical, legal, political, social and psychological aspects of fraud and fraud prevention
Economics of online crime, including measurement studies of underground economies and models of e-crime
Uncovering and disrupting online criminal collaboration and gangs
Financial infrastructure of e-crime, including payment processing and money laundering
Techniques to assess the risks and yields of attacks and the effectiveness of countermeasures
Delivery techniques, including spam, voice mail, social network and web search manipulation; and countermeasures
Techniques to avoid detection, tracking and take-down; and ways to block such techniques
Best practices for detecting and avoiding damages to critical internet infrastructure, such as DNS and SCADA, from electronic crime activities

Accepted papers will be published in proceedings. In addition, cash awards will be given for the best paper overall and the best student co-authored paper. A limited number of cash travel awards will also be made to student authors of papers and posters.

Instructions for Authors
eCrime has adopted the IEEE publication format. Submissions should be in English, in PDF format with all fonts embedded, formatted using the the IEEE conference template, found here: https://www.ieee.org/conferences_events/conferences/publishing/templates.html. Submissions should include author names, affiliations and acknowledgments. They should not exceed 12 letter-sized pages, not counting the bibliography and appendices. Papers should begin with a title, abstract, and an introduction that clearly summarizes the contributions of the paper at a level appropriate for a non-specialist reader. Papers should contain a scholarly exposition of ideas, techniques, and results, including motivation, relevance to practical applications, and a clear comparison with related work. Committee members are not required to read appendices, and papers should be intelligible without them. Submitted papers risk being rejected without consideration of their merits if they do not follow all the above guidelines. Submissions must not substantially duplicate work that was published elsewhere, or work that any of the authors has submitted in parallel to any other conference or workshop that has proceedings.

Authors will be asked to indicate whether their submissions should be considered for the best student paper award; any paper co-authored by a full-time student is eligible for this award.

Authors of accepted papers must guarantee that their paper will be presented at the conference. A limited number of stipends are available to those unable to obtain funding to attend the conference. Students whose papers are accepted and who will present the paper themselves are given priority to receive such assistance. Requests for stipends should be addressed to the general chair after August 20.

Full papers have to be submitted via easychair: https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ecrs2014. First, papers have to be registered, then authors can upload their papers. A successful submission can be viewed in EasyChair, and a confirmation email is sent to the corresponding author. Please make sure you receive that confirmation email when you submit, and follow the directions in that email if you require any follow up.

Case Studies
A special category is available in the paper submission system for Case Studies. This category allows for industrial research and case studies that do not qualify as full academic papers. Note though that papers submitted to this category are highly technical. For consideration in this category please submit your case study via easychair: https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ecrime2014. First, Case Studies have to be registered, then authors can upload their papers. A successful submission can be viewed in EasyChair, and a confirmation email is sent to the corresponding author. Please make sure you receive that confirmation email when you submit, and follow the directions in that email if you require any follow up.

Important Dates: (11:59pm US EDT)

Full Papers and Case Studies registration and submission due: June 13, 2014 (extended)
Paper Notifications due: July 18, 2014
Camera ready due: August 18, 2014
Conference: September 23-25, 2014

Organizing Committee
General Chair: