The PET Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies this year went to two really cool papers on differential privacy. Check out the papers by Cynthia Dwork and Frank McSherry and Kunal Talwar (Microsoft Research).
My coauthors and I feel honored to have two of our papers listed as runners-up for the award! BLAC and PEREA address the topic of accountable anonymity, where users can authenticate to services anonymously, and services can blacklist anonymous users without knowing who they are (there are no trusted parties who can identify users either). Services can blacklist users for whatever reason, and users don’t care because their privacy is not affected, thus striking a balance between anonymity and accountability.
