RTG International Guest: Professor Mauro Conti, University of Padua

On September 20, 2023, Professor Mauro Conti from the University of Padua, Italy gave an exciting lecture about the covert & side stories i.e. threats evolution in traditional and modern technologies at TU Darmstadt.

This lecture was organized primarily for RTG’s doctoral candidates as part of continuous efforts to attract international guests who could share their research and experience thus helping our students thrive in their research work.

RTG´s scientific coordinator – Dr. Ephraim Zimmer – presented RTG Privacy and Trust after which Professor Conti gave his lecture focusing on threats coming from contextual information and the extent to which it is feasible to infer very specific information. In particular, he talked about attacks like inferring actions that a user is doing on mobile apps, by eavesdropping their encrypted network traffic, identifying the presence of a specific user within a network through analysis of energy consumption, or inferring information (also key one like passwords and PINs) through timing, acoustic, or video information. The lecture, held in hybrid format, finished with a lively Q&A session.

After the lecture, networking continued in an informal atmosphere over some refreshments.