Obfuscation strategies offer creative ways to evade surveillance, protect privacy, and improve security by adding, rather than concealing, data to make it more ambiguous and difficult to exploit. This interdisciplinary workshop convenes researchers, scientists, developers, and artists to discuss a broad range of technical, theoretical, and policy approaches to obfuscation, from tools that anonymize users’ social media data to new methods for writing code itself.

We will survey some of the existing and emerging applications and technologies, threat models and scenarios for which obfuscation offers solutions, tests and tools for studying the strengths and weaknesses of obfuscation approaches, new challenges and applications (such as authentication, intellectual property, and security), benchmarks and approaches to formalizing obfuscation strategies, and general best practices for design, implementation, and evaluation of obfuscating systems.

International Program and Organizing Committee:

Paul Ashley, Anoyome Labs
Benoît Baudry, INRIA, France
Finn Brunton, New York University
Saumya Debray, University of Arizona
Cynthia Dwork, Harvard University
Rachel Greenstadt, Drexel University
Seda Gürses, Princeton University
Anna Lysyanskaya, Brown University
Helen Nissenbaum, Cornell Tech & New York University
Alexander Pretschner, Technische Universität München
Reza Shokri, Cornell Tech

Sponsored by: NYU Department of Media, Culture and Communication, NYU Information Law Institute, National Science Foundation

Funded with a grant from the National Science Foundation

International Workshop on Obfuscation: Science, Technology, and Theory