Ellis Fenske

Research Interests

I work in privacy, and mainly study areas related to technical methods to circumvent network surveillence and censorship in practice, and am interested in taking a theoretical approach to help understand, analyze, and improve these circumvention systems. I'm also interested in how novel technical measures designed to protect privacy in emerging technologies succeeds or fails as deployed in reality.

I look at these problems primarily from the perspectives of information theory and cryptography, and am interested broadly in networking as well as related sociopolitical issues related to surveillence and censorship. More specifically, my primary active research areas are:

• Censorship Circumvention via Fully Encrypted Protocols
• Measuring Strong Anonymity Systems
• Location Privacy in Mobile Devices
• Data breaches in the US Legal System

I'm also interested in (hobbies):

• Category Theory and Programming Language Semantics
• Theoretical Cryptography
• Mathematical Logic
• Probability and Statistics

I'm happy to talk to Midshipmen interested in any of these areas.

Publications list updated 8/6/2024, for an up-to-date list, please see my Google Scholar Profile

Refereed Publications

1. Bytes to Schlep? Use a FEP: Hiding Protocol Metadata with Fully Encrypted Protocols. Ellis Fenske, Aaron Johnson. ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS). Septemer, 2024. 
2. Not Easily Dismissed: The Growing Importance of Data Breach Litigation in Cybersecurity. Jeff Kosseff, Chris Brown, Ellis Fenske, Don Needham. Boston University Journal of Science and Technology Law (2024, accepted for publication).
3. Security Notions for Fully Encrypted Protocols. Ellis Fenske, Aaron Johnson. Free and Open Com-
   munication on the Internet (FOCI). January, 2023. 
4. Blind My- An Improved Cryptographic Protocol to Prevent Stalking in Apple’s Find My Network.
   Travis Mayberry, Erik-Oliver Blass, Ellis Fenske. Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETS). July, 2023.
5. Travis Mayberry, Ellis Fenske, Dane Brown, Jeremy Martin, Christine Fossaceca, Erik Rye, and Lucas Foppe. Who Tracks the Trackers? Circumventing Apple's Anti-Tracking Alerts in the Find My Network. 20th Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society (WPES). November, 2021.
6. Ellis Fenske, Akshaya Mani, Aaron Johnson, Micah Sherr. Accountable Private Set Cardinality for Distributed Measurement. ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security (TOPS). Accepted. 2021
7. Ellis Fenske, Dane Brown, Jeremy Martin, Travis Mayberry, Peter Ryan, and Erik Rye. Three Years Later: A Study of MAC Address Randomization in Mobile Devices And When It Succeeds. Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETS). July, 2021.
8. Jeremy Martin, Douglas Alpuche, Kristina Bodeman, Lamont Brown, Ellis Fenske, Lucas Foppe, Travis Mayberry, Erik Rye, Brandon Sipes, Sam Teplov. Handoff All Your Privacy – A Review of Apple’s Bluetooth Low Energy Continuity Protocol. Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETS). July, 2019.
9. Ellis Fenske*, Akshaya Mani*, Aaron Johnson, Micah Sherr. Distributed Measurement with Private Set-Union Cardinality. ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), November 2017. (*Co-First Authors)