bio

I am a research scientist at RISE - Research Institutes of Sweden. My academic and professional expertise lies in the intersection between cyber-secure and privacy-preserving systems. On the design and development utilizing cryptographic primitives and Privacy Enhancing Technologies to preserve secrecy, authenticity, and anonymity.

I hold a Ph.D. from COSIC, fortunate to be supervised by Prof. Bart Preneel at KU Leuven. During my academic carrier, I was a post-doctoral researcher at NSS of KTH, at SnT of the University of Luxembourg, and at COSIC of KU Leuven. Furthermore, I hold a master’s in Digital Systems Security from the University of Piraeus and an Information and Communication Engineering degree from the University of the Aegean.

During my academic and professional carrier, I helped to manage, deliver, and write academic and industrial projects. On topics including but not limited to Intelligent Transport Systems for secure and privacy-preserving vehicular information-sharing, End-to-End encryption for private messaging, SSO and PKI identity management, and on the privacy and data protection infringes of Facebook third-party applications (the work received media coverage) - the technical and societal challenges of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. I hold certifications in ISO/IEC 27001 for ICT audit and in designing cyber-resilient systems. Also, my didactic and pedagogical skills are built upon certification, counting more than eight years of experience as the result of teaching and supervision from first graders to university students.

Academic Service Served/serving as a - TPC member, reviewer for:

Journals:

IEEE IoT 2021/2022

IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing 2022 Computers & Security 2019–2020

ACM Transactions on the Web (TWEB) 2020,

Journal of Cybersecurity and Privacy 2021–2022

Conferences:

PoPETs 2023 (TPC), PoPETS 2019-2021 (external reviewer), 2022 TPC

IEEE ISC2 2022, Smart Security and Privacy track

ICISSP 2016-2021,

CPDP 2019, 2021

DPM@ESORICS 2019

IEEE Security & Privacy 2021 (external reviewer)

Session chair:

ICISSP 2016, 2020

CPDP 2020

Awards and Media attention

Our papers, “Collateral Damage by Facebook Applications: a Comprehensive Study” and “Collateral Damage of Facebook Apps: Friends, Providers, and Privacy Interdependence”, appeared in NBC News (published: 21/03/2018, title: “Researchers say it was easy to take people’s data from Facebook”, author: Brandy Zadrozny) and in an article of France24 (last modification: 21/03/2018). AOL re-posted the article here.

Awards: FWO short research visit grant: Research visit at CrySyS lab and Prof. Gergely Biczók, BME University, Budapest, Hungary, I obtained an FWO travel grant to study the interdependent privacy issues of third-party applications on Facebook.

Certificates and training: Submitted by isymeonidis on Thu, 01/20/2022 - 07:28 June 2015 - “International Course on Cyber Security and Cryptography”, COSIC@KU Leuven, Belgium. “Academic English and writing”, KU Leuven, Belgium.

Dec 2014 - “The ENCS Red Team Blue Team Training” - Advanced Cyber Security Course, ENCS, The Hague, Netherlands.

Oct 2014 - “Privacy and identity management” - IFIP Summer School, Patra, Greece.

Sept 2014 - “How to supervise master thesis students”, KU Leuven, Belgium.

Dec 2013 - “Writing for a general audience”, KU Leuven, Belgium.

Oct 2013 - “Secure Application Development”, The SecAppDev course, Leuven, Belgium.

Feb 2014 - “Information Security Management Systems (ISMS) Lead Auditor certification” - ISO/IEC 27001:2005, TUV NORD, Athens, Greece.

Jan 2013 - “Intensive Programme on Information and Communication Systems Security” (IPICS)“, Privacy and Identity Management for Life”, Vienna, Austria.

Sept. 2013 - “Modern pedagogical and teaching methods in education”, KPH Graz, Austria.

Research visits / stays: Feb. 2020 - Research visit at COSIC@KULeuven: I initiated discussions with A. Madhusudan about secure V2X systems and privacy-preserving off-chain smart contract protocols. The collaboration resulted at a bilateral FNR INTER (SnT@University of Luxembourg) / FWO (COSIC@KU Leuven) project proposal submission

April 2019 - Potential industrial collaboration at FCA Bank: I initiated discussions with S. Leucci about secure vehicular sharing systems, Turin, Italy

Jan. 2019 - Research visit at DCS@University of Manchester: I initiated discussions with Prof. M. Mustafa about secure V2X systems, Manchester, UK

Feb 2017 - Research visit at CrySyS lab@BME and Prof. G. Bicz0k [supported by an FWO grant] During my research visit, we extended our study, published at IFIP SEC’16, on the impact of the interdependent privacy problem on Facebook users. The outcome of this collaboration resulted in the journal publication “Collateral Information Collection by Facebook Applications: a Comprehensive Study” at COSE’18