Teaching and supervision

Assignments

I'm happy to supervise any students wishing to graduate in the area of privacy, identity management, applied cryptography. I maintain a separate page with student guides.

Current assignments

• Laura Philipse, Server-side tagging, MSc, 9/2023-2/2024.
• Sander Blijenberg, Security/Privacy risks of interoperability, MSc, 2/2023-7/2023.
• Ayala Hoeks, “Privacy of connected cars: where does the data go”, MSc @ Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens, 07/2022–11/2022.

Internships

A popular option is to perform the graduation project as an intern at a company. For example:

• TNO
• Considerati

Open assignments

Please contact me to discuss a suitable project. External projects are certainly a possibility. The following list of project summaries give you an idea of the kind of assignments that are currently open.

Privacy risks of federated social networks

The (potentially) federated nature of social networks like Bluesky or Mastodon force them to cooperate with other (possibly less trusted) nodes and make more information available to those. Analyse and compare the privacy risks, also compared to centralised social networks like Twitter/X.

Privacy friendly blocking on federated social networks

Blocking is one example of a potential privacy risks on federated social networks. Are there privacy friendly ways to block users on such networks, that do not leak the block list to bystanders or curious parties.

Privacy friendly payments

I have an idea to build a privacy friendly payment app on a smartphone, that you can use to pay in a shop by tapping a normal contactless payment terminal. Goal of this assignment is to build an actual demonstrator. First step would be to build and test an open source contactless card emulator for Android, based on the EMV standard.

Collaborative editing and IPFS

Collaborative editing services like CryptPad (that is also end-to-end encrypted), and Etherpad coordinate user interactions through a central instance that maintains state. Would it be possible to make such services rely less on a central coordinator, and use e.g. the IPFS to store the data in a distributed fashion?

Anonymous communication

Can the anonymous communication protocol based on a public bulletin board be strengthened with / or integrated into the Nym ecosystem?

Matrix Security and Privacy

Some people say that the privacy and security properties of Matrix (and its default client Element) are less than ideal. Study to what extent these issues are significant, and investigate how they could (realistically) be solved.

QR ordering security and privacy

Since corona, more bars and restaurants offer QR ordering and integrated payment options. How secure are those? What personal/payment information is leaked, and to which parties? Are there ways to make these systems more secure and privacy friendly?

An API for a Public Stack

TBD

Privacy Coach

Think of ways how you can use a mobile device to protect your privacy...

See also this older information about education

Courses

I teach the following course

• Privacy Seminar, course code NWI-I00136, spring semester.

I also set up and used to teach IT in the context of the law and Privacy and Data Protection (as 2nd teacher) to law students, at the University of Groningen.

I, and other people in our group, sometimes teach a cryptography and security lab for high-school students.

Professional courses

I used to teach the following post-academic, professional, courses.

• Data Science en Gegevensbescherming, CPO, also co-course director.