Dali Kaafar

Dali Kaafar

Professor, Executive Director

Please reach out if you believe you are the right candidate to join us.

Open Postdoc Positions

The Information Security and Privacy ISP Group at Macquarie University and The Macquarie University Cyber Security Hub is hiring two postdoctoral research fellows in Security and Privacy.

** August 2023: Several open POSTDOCTORAL Research positions** IN INFORMATION SECURITY AND PRIVACY

If you are passionate about S&P and/or ML/AI, Cyber threat intelligence, Anti Scam Technologies, data Analytics and can demonstrate a prestigious research track record in any of the following, please reach out and apply.

-Trustworthy Machine Learning, Fairness and Accountability -Privacy and Security in Machine Learning -Legal and Ethics of ML -Security and Privacy of OMICS -Information Security and Applied Cryptography -Internet privacy and security analytics

Past openings include:

https://jobs.mq.edu.au/en/job/507960/postdoc-research-fellow

https://jobs.mq.edu.au/en/job/507903/postdoc-research-fellow-cyber-security-research

https://jobs.mq.edu.au/en/job/507902/postdoc-research-fellow-data-privacy-in-ai-platforms-dpaip

If you are passionate about S&P and/or ML/AI, Cyber threat intelligence, Anti Scam Technologies, data Analytics and can demonstrate a prestigious research track record in any of the following, please reach out and apply.

-Trustworthy Machine Learning, Fairness and Accountability -Privacy and Security in Machine Learning -Legal and Ethics of ML -Security and Privacy of OMICS -Information Security and Applied Cryptography -Internet privacy and security analytics

#cybersecurity #privacy #informationsecurity #postdocs #Research

Open Scholarship Positions:

Several Domestic PhD Scholarships available. Send me an email if you’re interested in pursuing a PhD in the broad areas of Cyber Security, Privacy, Human Centric Security and ML security.

**International PhD scholarship **

For International Students: Interested in a PhD in Internet privacy and security analytics or Machine learning security and privacy analysis, apply for the following Scholarship:

https://www.mq.edu.au/research/phd-and-research-degrees/scholarships/scholarship-search/data/internet-privacy-and-security-analytics

#scholarships #cybersecuritythreats #MQCSH #machinelearning #AI

Past scholarships openings inlude:

–MRes / PhD Positions Openings and Scholarships. Interested in Postgraduate Research in Cyber Security and Online Privacy under my supervision?

Drop me an email at (Dali.kaafar\@\@\@mq.edu.au) with Subject line “Request for Applications for PhD (MRes) scholarship)“.

Start by taking a look at This for information about Admission/Scholarship/Research Proposals, Timelines, etc…

Recent Achievements (Quite outdated. Please take a look at the publications page):

The paper develops differentially private gradient descent algorithms for training Machine learning models on distributed private datasets owned by different entities. We prove that the quality of the trained ML model using DP gradient descent algorithm scales inversely with privacy budgets squared, and the size of the distributed datasets squared, which establishes a trade-off between privacy and utility in privacy-preserving ML;

We also develop a theory that enables to predict the outcome of a potential collaboration among privacy-aware data owners (or data custodians) in terms of the fitness cost of the ML training model prior to executing potentially computationally-expensive ML algorithms on distributed privately-owned datasets.

-Our paper “The Chain of Implicit Trust: An Analysis of the Web Third-party Resources Loading” is accepted in WWW 2019.The paper can be found at: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1901.07699.pdf

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1811.03197.pdf

-Our Paper entitled “Incognito: A Method for Obfuscating Web Data” has been accepted to the Research Track of WWW 2018. Well-done Rahat !

-Our Paper on quantification of Behavioural tracking risks has been accepted at PETS’2018. Congrats Rahat and Ben.

-There has been quite a lot of media coverage on our work on VPN Mobile Apps Security and Privacy (IMC’16 paper) including ITWire, Slashdot, Security Week, ABC News, TheRegister, Technology Decisions, SHM, …

-Our paper ”Measuring, Characterizing, and Detecting Facebook Like Farms” has been accepted in ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security.

-Our paper on “Towards Seamless Tracking-Free Web: Improved Detection of Trackers via One-class Learning” has been accepted to the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium PETS’17. Well done Ikram.

-Two papers accepted at ACM Internet Measurement Conference IMC ‘16 this year.

-I was a panelist in the National Fintech Cyber Security Summit to talk about Alternatives to Passwords. Checkout the Program Fintech Program.

–SplitBox our Private Network Function Virtualization platform is to be presented at SIGCOMM hotmiddlebox.

-Our paper “Private Processing of Outsourced Network Functions: Feasibility and Constructions” has been selected as Best paper of SDN-NFV Security and invited for the NFV World Congress. 

-5 Jan. 2016. Our work on Implicit Authentication is featured in popular Australian lifestyle tech media outlet, Techly. The article is a forward-looking piece that discusses Data61’s fascinating research into the area of authentication.

-28 Nov 2015. Great ! Our paper designing and building an optimisation model for Search Engine Adwords management got accepted in IEEE INFOCOM 2016.

-17 Nov. 2015. I gave an interview to Sydney Morning Herald resulting in a coverage in the SMH, Digital Life section, titled “Your mobile phone may soon recognise you by the way you move”.  The article has been syndicated to The Age, Canberra Times, WAToday and Brisbane Times.

– 24 Oct. 2015. Our Paper ” TLS in the wild: an Internet-wide analysis of TLS-based protocols for electronic communication” is accepted in NDSS 2016. A job well done Ralph and Olivier!

-19 Oct. 2015. I gave the Keynote Speech of IFIP Performance 2015, entitled :”Online security and Network measurement: The Why and how to get the best of the two worlds”.

– Our Paper on “Characterizing and Predicting Viral-and-Popular Video Content” has been presented in ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (ACM CIKM 2015).

– Our Paper on Privacy-Preserving Recommendation Systems has been accepted in ACM RecSys 2015. It has been selected as a Distinguished paper.

-Attacks on Foxtail Human authentication Protocols. Published in IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics & Security. Good job Hassan. The paper entitled : “On the Linearization of Human Identification Protocols: Attacks based on Linear Algebra, Coding Theory and Lattices” can be found here.

-Another paper accepted in WWW15, the Web Science Track. The paper is on characterising user behaviour in Mobile Live Streaming Systems. Well-done Zhenyu!

-Great News ! Our paper “Early Detection of Spam Mobile Apps” got in WWW 2015 ! -Our research on Facebook Advertisement and likes fraud is featured in MIT Tech Review. The paper itself can be found here. Other media coverage include: The Telegraph, Pacific Standard, ACM Tech News,finance.yahoo.com

-A Paper co-authored with UCI folks on “Stylometric Linkability of Tweets” accepted in WPES 2014 . Congrats guys!

-Our paper submitted to ACM CoNEXT 2014 got in. The paper is a joint work with ICT-CAS, QMUL and CMU. “Trace-Driven Analysis of ICN Caching Algorithms on Video-on-Demand Workloads” by Y. Sun, F. Seyed Kaveh, G. Yang, S. Vyas, J. Yun, M.A. Kaafar and S. Uhlig. Great job folks!

-We have two papers accepted in ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC 2014) this year. “Paying for Likes? Understanding Facebook Like Fraud Using Honeypots” with UCL and ucsd folks and “Censorship in the Wild: Analyzing Internet Filtering in Syria” with Inria and UCL folks. a Job well-done guys!

-A column entitled “The Privacy opportunity” I edited appeared in the Technology Decisions Magazine.