Nazanin Takbiri

University of Massachusetts Amherst

PhD Student

Nazanin Takbiri received her B.S. degree from University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran, in 2012 and M.S. degree from Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey, in 2016. She is currently working toward the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA, USA. Her research interests include Privacy & Security issues with a focus on IoT privacy.

Research Abstract:

Modern applications significantly enhance user experience by adapting to each user’s individual condition and/or preferences. While this adaptation can greatly improve a user’s experience or be essential for the application to work, the exposure of user data to the application presents a significant privacy threat to the users\textemdash even when the traces are anonymized (since the statistical matching of an anonymized trace to prior user behaviour can identify a user and their habits). Because of the current and growing algorithmic and computational capabilities of adversaries, provable privacy guarantees as a function of the degree of anonymization and obfuscation of the traces are necessary. We derive the theoretical bounds on the privacy of users in such a scenario.