Apu Kapadia: Research Statement past and Current Research

My research focuses on computer security, with particular emphasis on user privacy. I like to apply sound theoretical techniques to societally relevant problems—a significant portion of my research has focused on empowering users to protect their privacy in a networked society where their personal information or habits are increasingly available to potentially-unauthorized third parties. I have explored solutions in which users place minimal trust in the system to protect their privacy, and make use of privacy-enhancing technologies such as anonymizing networks and anonymous credential systems to access or publish information privately [1, 4, 13, 12]. In situations where complete anonymity against the system may be impractical, I have developed policy-based solutions in which users trust the system to enforce their privacy policies against other users [6, 8, 7, 9]. I am also committed to developing usable security and privacy mechanisms [9, 6, 2], and am interested in other security topics such as secure distributed hash tables (DHTs) [10], keyboard acoustic emanations, privacy in social-networking applications, and querier-side privacy.