Hi

My name is Kasra EdalatNejad wich is written 'کسرا عدالت نژاد' in persian.

I'm a fourth-year Ph.D. student in the SPRING lab at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), advised by Carmela Troncoso . Furthermore, I'm a member of the Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Contracts (IC3) . My research interest is applied cryptography and privacy. I believe that privacy is a tool that helps us build fascinating systems rather than restricting them. Hence, my main focus is on analyzing the privacy requirements of systems and designing private alternatives.

My academic origin is rooted in the informatics olympiad and I attained Silver medal in 2011's International Olympiad in Informatics during my high school years. Before joining EPFL, I did my undergraduate studies at Department of Computer Engineering of Sharif University of Technology.

Research interest

Honor & Awards

Publication

  • K. EdalatNejad, W. Lueks, J. Martin, S. Ledésert, A. Lhôte, B. Thomas, L. Girod and C. Troncoso, “DatashareNetwork: A Decentralized Privacy-Preserving Search Engine for Investigative Journalists”, in USENIX security 2020
  • M. Drijvers, K. EdalatNejad, B. Ford, E. Kiltz, J. Loss, G. Neven and I. Stepanovs, “On the Security of Two-Round Multi-Signatures”, in IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P 2019)
  • M. Drijvers, K. EdalatNejad, B. Ford, and G. Neven “Okamoto Beats Schnorr: On the Provable Security of Multi-Signatures”, IACR Cryptology ePrint Archive 2018
  • H. Zhang, K. EdalatNejad, A. Rahmati and H. V. Madhyastha, “Towards Comprehensive Repositories of Opinions”, In 15th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets 2016)

DatashareNetwork Project

DatashareNetwork is a peer-to-peer privacy-preserving document search engine which is designed for journalists by journalists.
This project is a collaboration between EPFL's security and privacy engineering lab (SPRING) and the international consortium of investigative journalists (ICIJ). ICIJ is an independent network of more than 200 journalists from 100 countries and territories, and their most distinguished work is Panama Papers which has received a Pulitzer Prize.

Investigative journalists collect and process a large volume of sensitive documents. Combing out piles of documents and gather insight from them requires effective tools, so ICIJ has developed a tool called Datashare to locally analyze and search documents. This tool is public, open-source, and free. You can try the beta version from here.

Many of these collected documents contain sensitive material and their possession may endanger journalists or their sources. Consequently, many journalists keep these documents locally and under tight locks. DatashareNetwork is the next step of the Datashare project which allows ICIJ journalists to search each others' local documents in a peer-to-peer fashion without the fear of leaking their documents or investigation topic.

DatashareNetwork has two primary components. (1) A privacy-preserving search which allows journalists to search for topics of interest without revealing their query while protecting documents by limiting the information revealed about them. (2) An anonymous messaging system which enables the querier to discuss collaboration with document owners. A core concept of DatashareNetwork is privacy by design, and we analyze and enforce privacy in all interaction of components from network to application layer. Feel free to read our paper about our new cryptographic primitives and privacy analysis in here.

DatashareNetwork is in the final phases of development, and we are planning to deploy the first version over the next year. Please follow ICIJ for more news about the project.

Papers:

USNIX version, Extended edition

Videos:

USENIX presentation

Code:

Proof of concept for cryptographic primitives: PoC
Anonymous credential library: SSCred library
Project repository: --private till the open release--

DatashareNetwork in media:

Contact

My resume is available here. Feel free to contact me.

About me | Research interest | Honors | Publications | Projects | CV
© 2015-2020 Kasra EdalatNejad. All Rights Reserved.