Guest lecture by Professor Valtteri Niemi (University of Turku): Privacy and Trust in Pervasive Social Networking

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) are useful tools for many purposes, e.g. for pervasive social networking. They may be used to complement social media tools available over the Internet. In addition to more traditional security threats, issues with privacy and trust constitute a major challenge in this kind of environment. Nokia Research Center and EPFL (Lausanne, Switzerland) carried out a 3-month field trial in the EPFL campus during 2011. The collected data set has been used to study privacy challenges in pervasive social networking. The talk covers main findings of this analysis and discusses countermeasures. Furthermore, it is shown how cryptography can be applied for the purpose of increasing privacy and trust in this kind of setting.

BIO

Valtteri Niemi received a PhD degree in Mathematics from the University of Turku, Finland in 1989. After serving in various positions in Univ. of Turku, he was an Associate Professor in Mathematics at the University of Vaasa, Finland, during 1993-97. He joined Nokia Research Center (NRC), Helsinki, Finland, in 1997. During 2008-2010 he was at the new NRC laboratory in Lausanne, Switzerland. Dr. Niemi was nominated as a Nokia Fellow in January 2009. During 2011, he was back in NRC/Helsinki. Dr. Niemi contributed in several roles for Nokia research in wireless security area, including cryptological aspects and privacy-enhancing technologies. Starting from 2012, Valtteri Niemi has been a Professor of Mathematics in Univ. of Turku, doing research in cryptology and its applications. Dr. Niemi participated 3GPP SA3 (security) standardization group from its beginning and during 2003-2009 he was the chairman of the group. Before 3GPP, Dr. Niemi took part in ETSI SMG 10 for GSM security specification work. He has published around 60 scientific articles and he is a co-author of four books and more than 20 patents.