Research Associate

Full-time: 35 hours per week

Fixed-term: 12 months 

We are looking for a post-doctoral position at the University of Edinburgh under the supervision of Tariq Elahi in real-world Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETS).

The Opportunity:

A 1-year post-doctoral position at the University of Edinburgh under the supervision of Tariq Elahi in real-world Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETS). Candidates with strong backgrounds and track records in Privacy and/or Security and related areas are encouraged to apply. The project is funded by the National Research Centre on Privacy, Harm Reduction and Adversarial Influence Online (rephrain.ac.uk) and there will be opportunities to interact and collaborate with centre researchers.

Project Name: Integrating Meta-data Privacy into Networked Applications through “Add-on” Anonymous Communication Networks (ACNs).

The aim will be to investigate how effectively and efficiently anonymous communication networks (ACN) can act as “add-ons” between applications that do not have privacy built-in by design (non-PbD apps) and the Internet at large.

We will investigate both connection-based low-latency applications (such as web-browsing) as well as message-based high-latency applications (such as network telemetry reporting or email). We will investigate the use of Tor for the former and state-of-the-art mixnets for the latter. For the low-latency applications, our approach will be to investigate novel and non-standard Tor client set ups, such as every non-PbD on a device accessing the Internet through a dedicated Tor process or all devices accessing the Internet through a single Tor gateway. We will adopt a similar approach for higher-latency applications.

 We expect that this project will positively impact adoption and hence we also wish to investigate the extent for how these ACN would cope with the increased load as well as the schemes to prevent abuse by the larger user bases.

 This project will displace the current folk wisdom that to add anonymity or privacy properties to a system the addition of sending all traffic through an ACN is sufficient. It will provide a nuanced approach to integrating anonymous networks (while we focus on Tor the results here can be extended to other PETs) to systems that are not originally privacy-aware. If successful, this project would provide the evidence (both of the analytic and empirical flavour) that spurs the integration of ACNs into systems as building blocks.

Your skills and attributes for success:

• A PhD (or close to) in Computer Science or related area. Research experience in both conducting empirical and analytical studies and communicating results in writing and verbally.

The following criteria are not yes/no factors, but questions of degree.  Recruitment will aim at selecting those candidates with the best possible performance in all these criteria.

• Prior research in the area of PETS, Privacy, Security, and related areas.
• Experience of research in the broad area of the related project.
• Preferably, experience in the specific area of the related project.
• Proven expertise in the techniques needed to undertake the research in question.
• Demonstrated quality of research performance.
• Ability to communicate complex information clearly, orally and in writing.

Informal enquiries to be directed to: Tariq Elahi t.elahi@ed.ac.uk 

Please note that feedback will be provided only to interviewed candidates.

Click to view a copy of the full job description.

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