The attendance to this seminar will be considered for the course evaluation in the same way as in the case of seminars from the “INESC-ID Distinguished Lectures” series.

Date: December 7, 12:30pm

Location: DEI Meeting room 0.19 (informática II building)

Abstract:

Humanitarian action, the process of aiding individuals in situations ofcrises, poses unique information-security challenges due to natural ormanmade disasters, the adverse environments in which it takes place, andthe scale and multi-disciplinary nature of the problems. Despite thesechallenges, humanitarian organizations are transitioning towards astrong reliance on digitalization of collected data and digital tools,which improves their effectiveness but also exposes them to computersecurity threats. This talk presents the first academic effort seekingto understand and address the computer-security challenges associatedwith the digitalizing humanitarian action.
First, I will describe a qualitative analysis of the computer-securitychallenges of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), alarge humanitarian organization with over sixteen thousand employees,legal privileges and immunities, and over 150 years of experience witharmed conflicts and other situations of violence worldwide. Second, Iwill present a research agenda to design and implement anonymitynetworks, block chains, and secure-processing systems addressing thesechallenges, and to deploy them in collaboration with the ICRC. I willclose with a discussion on how to generalize our approach to providedigital immunity to humanitarian and other at-risk organisations.

After having enjoyed sun bathing at INRIA Sophia-Antipolis, and actualbathing at the MPI-SWS, Stevens is now skiing in Switzerland where he'sa research scientist at EPFL. His Ph.D. thesis on the privacy analysisof the Skype protocol has has led to privacy enhancements of the Skypearchitecture which is daily used by hundreds of millions of users. Hispost-graduate work on anonymity networks was qualified of the“[next-generation] anonymity network closest to deployment” byArsTechnica. He is one of the first academic researchers to have studiedthe computer security practices of politically-motivated attackers andtheir targets. His research has been published in leading conferencessuch as Oakland, Usenix Security, NDSS, SIGCOMM, and IMC.