I am a professor at UNIL-HEC Lausanne, where I lead the Information Security and Privacy Lab, within the Department of Information Systems. Before I joined UNIL in 2016, I held a tenured researcher position (Chargé de Recherche) at LAAS-CNRS, which I joined in 2015, in the Dependable Computing and Fault Tolerance group (TSF). Prior to that, I worked as a post-doctoral researcher at EPFL, in the Laboratory for Communications and Applications (LCA1) headed by Jean-Pierre Hubaux, from 2011 to 2014, and at McGill University, in the Distributed Information Systems Laboratory (DISL) headed by Bettina Kemme, in 2011. During my time at EPFL, I worked for some time at the Nokia Research Center.
I earned my PhD degree from the Université of Rennes and Inria in 2010 and my master’s degree in computer science from the Université de Nice — Sophia Antipolis in 2007. During my PhD, I worked in the Large-Scale Dynamic Distributed System Group (ASAP) at IRISA–Inria, under the supervision of Anne-Marie Kermarrec (now at EPFL). I did an internship at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and at Telefonica I&D in 2008 and 2009 respectively. I am a former student of Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS) de Cachan – Antenne de Bretagne (now ENS Rennes)
I published 15+ articles in international journals and 40+ articles in international conferences and I filed 2 patents with Nokia; I received the Best Student Paper Award at OPODIS’09, the Best Paper Award at IEEE ICDCS’10 and a scientific excellence award from CNRS. My global research interest is in security and privacy in distributed systems and mobile (social) networks, with a special emphasis on the human and social aspects of security and privacy. I am particularly interested in interdisciplinary research projects on privacy, at the frontier between computer science and social sciences (incl. law and economics) and/or medicine (mHealth, genomics, medical databases).
Joint Publications:
Salehzadeh Niksirat, K., Velykoivanenko, L., Zufferey, N., Cherubini, M., Huguenin, K. & Humbert, M. (2024) Wearable Activity Trackers: A Survey on Utility, Privacy, and Security. ACM Computing Surveys (ACM CSUR). Vol. 56, Issue. 7, Article 183 (April 2024), 40 pages. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3645091
Niksirat, K. S., Korka, D., Jacquemin, Q., Vanini, C., Humbert, M., Cherubini, M., … & Huguenin, K. (2024). Security and Privacy with Second-Hand Storage Devices: A User-Centric Perspective from Switzerland. Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PoPETs), 2024(2), 22.: https://serval.unil.ch/en/notice/serval:BIB_B69A6B006D03
Maceiras, M., Salehzadeh Niksirat, K., Bernard, G., Garbinato, B., Cherubini, M., Humbert, M., & Huguenin, K. (2024). Know their Customers: An Empirical Study of Online Account Enumeration Attacks. ACM Transactions on the Web. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3664201
Arianna Boldi, Alessandro Silacci, Marc-Olivier Boldi, Mauro Cherubini, Maurizio Caon, Noé Zufferey, Kévin Huguenin, & Amon Rapp. (2023). Exploring the impact of commercial wearable activity trackers on body awareness and body representations : A mixed-methods study on self-tracking. Computers in Human Behavior, 108036. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2023.108036
Aliyu, S., Salehzadeh Niksirat, K., Huguenin, K. & Cherubini, M. (2023) On the Extent to which Cyberbullying is Fueled by the Disclosure of Personal Information. Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PoPETs) 2023 (4) pages 468-483 (July 2023). DOI: 10.56553/popets-2023-0120
Salehzadeh Niksirat, K., Korka, D., Harkous, H., Cherubini, M., & Huguenin, K. (2023) On the Potential of Mediation Chatbots for Mitigating Online Multiparty Privacy Conflicts – A Wizard-of-Oz Study. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 7, CSCW1, Article 142 (April 2023), 33 pages. [BLOG]. DOI: 10.1145/3579618
M. Humbert, I. D. Dupertuis, M. Cherubini, K. Huguenin. KGP Meter: Communicating Kin Genomic Privacy to the Masses. In Proceedings of the IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy (EuroS&P), Genoa, Italy, p. 20, Jun 2022. DOI: 10.1109/EuroSP53844.2022.00033
Velykoivanenko, L., Salehzadeh Niksirat, K., Zufferey, N., Humbert, M., Huguenin, K., & Cherubini, M. 2021. Are Those Steps Worth Your Privacy? Fitness-Tracker Users’ Perceptions of Privacy and Utility. Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (IMWUT) 5, 4, Article 181 (December 2021), 41 pages. DOI: 10.1145/3494960
K. Salehzadeh Niksirat, E. Anthoine-Milhomme, S. Randin, K. Huguenin, and M. Cherubini. 2021. “I thought you were okay”: Participatory Design with Young Adults to Fight Multiparty Privacy Conflicts in Online Social Networks. In Designing Interactive Systems Conference 2021 (DIS ’21), Virtual Event, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 21 pages. DOI: 10.1145/3461778.3462040 [presentation video] [teaser video]
M. Cherubini, K. Salehzadeh Niksirat, M-O. Boldi, H. Keopraseuth, J. M. Such, K. Huguenin. 2021. When Forcing Collaboration is the Most Sensible Choice: Desirability of Precautionary and Dissuasive Mechanisms to Manage Multiparty Privacy Conflicts. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, CSCW edition, 35 pages. DOI: 10.1145/3449127 [presentation video]
A. Meylan, M. Cherubini, B. Chapuis, M. Humbert, I. Bilogrevic, and K. Huguenin. 2020. A Study on the Use of Checksums for Integrity Verification of Web Downloads. ACM Transasctions on Privacy and Security (TOPS), 24, 1, Article 4 (September 2020), 36 pages. DOI: 10.1145/3410154
B. Chapuis, O. Omolola, M. Cherubini, M. Humbert, K. Huguenin. An Empirical Study of the Use of Integrity Verification Mechanisms for Web Subresources. In Proc. of the The Web Conference (WWW’20), Taipei, Taiwan, Apr 2020. DOI:10.1145/3366423.3380092
M. Cherubini, A. Meylan, B. Chapuis, M. Humbert, I. Bilogrevic, K. Huguenin (2018). Towards Usable Checksums: Automating the Integrity Verification of Web Downloads for the Masses. In Proc. of the 25th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS’18), Toronto, ON, Canada, Oct 2018. DOI: 10.1145/3243734.3243746