There was a lot of talk about digital privacy during the session ‘Cryptography: the need and the dilemma’, so much so that at the end of the event the ‘Best Portuguese Internet Research’ by the Portuguese Chapter of the Internet Society (ISOC) was awarded to Daniela Lopes, a Doctoral student at Instituto Superior Técnico, and her colleagues for the paper ‘Flow Correlation Attacks on Tor Onion Service Sessions with Sliding Subset Sum’. The session took place of 11 December, at Técnico – Alameda campus, in the Civil Engineering Building.
The award-winning work, co-authored by Daniela’s supervisors, researchers Nuno Santos (Técnico and Instituto de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computadores: Investigação e Desenvolvimento (INESC ID)) and Nicolas Christin (Carnegie Mellon University (CMU)), with Pedro Medeiros e Daniel Castro, (both Técnico and Inesc-ID), Diogo Barradas (University of Waterloo), Bernardo Portela (Inesc-TEC), Jin-Dong Dong (CMU), João Vinagre (Inesc-TEC) and Bernardo Ferreira (LASIGE/Ciências), was published in the proceedings of the 2024 edition of the prestigious ‘Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium’.
Daniela Lopes expressed her happiness at receiving the award, noting that “many people don’t think about privacy every day simply because, fortunately, they have not been deprived of it.” Aware that this situation could change “at any moment”, believes that ‘it’s good that there is a lot of research and discussion in this field – if we don’t educate ourselves about our rights, we can’t rely on others to do it for us.”
The debate that preceded the award ceremony echoed this message. Maria Manuel Leitão Marques, member of the European Parliament between 2019 and 2024 and former Minister for the Presidency, argued that ‘it’s time to think about how we want to protect our children on the internet’. ‘We need to implement strategies to protect the most vulnerable, namely children, in the virtual world, in the same way that we protect them from dangers in the physical world,’ she added. Also taking part in the discussion was the director of Internet Trust – Internet Society, Robin Wilton (who recalled that ‘the processes for detecting risks or irregularities online are not 100% reliable. Accusing someone can have catastrophic, very damaging effects’), and Miguel Pupo Correia, a full professor at Técnico.
Daniela Lopes is doing an Affiliated PhD Program in Computer Science and Engineering under the CMU Portugal Program, an initiative funded by the Foundation for Science and Technology, resulting from the collaboration between the Portuguese government and Carnegie Mellon University. The award-winning work was developed within the framework of this partnership.
