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Teaching and supervision

Assignments Courses

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

  • Lemonia Papanikolaou, Binding Credentials, MSc, 1/2024-7/2024.
  • Laura Philipse, Client-side scanning, MSc, 9/2023-2/2024.
  • Sander Blijenberg, Security/Privacy risks of interoperability, MSc, 2/2023-7/2023.
  • Mitchel Jansen, Signal privacy, MSc, 1/2023-6/2023.
  • Alessandra van Veen, privacy of push notifications, internship, 09/2022–01/2023.
  • 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:

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 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...
Strengthening the binding between people and their on-line credentials.
Within the IRMA project, we are developing a platform for attribute based credentials, where the credentials are stored on a smart card. Credentials are personal, and it should be impossible to use the credential of someone else (your older brother for instance) to buy age restricted material on line. Currently, we use PIN codes to prevent this. But this is weak if your brother is happy to share his PIN with you. Goal of this project is to study ways to bind credentials to individuals, and to think of new ways to make this binding stronger.

See also this older information about education

Courses

I teach the following course

I also 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 teach the following post-academic, professional, courses.

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

Last Version - Mon Jul 11 11:22:13 2022 +0200 / e1e3326.
(Note: changeover from CVS to dotless svn version numbers on Jan 19, 2008, and changeover to GIT versioning on May 30, 2013.)
Maintained by Jaap-Henk Hoepman
Email: jhh@cs.ru.nl