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About

About

João P. Vilela is a professor at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Porto and a senior researcher at INESC TEC and CISUC. He was previously a professor at the Department of Informatics Engineering of the University of Coimbra, after receiving the Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2011 from the University of Porto, Portugal. He was a visiting researcher at Georgia Tech, working on physical-layer security, and at MIT, working on security for network coding. In recent years, Dr. Vilela has been coordinator and team member of several national, bilateral, and European-funded projects in security and privacy. His main research interests are in security and privacy of computer and communication systems, with applications such as wireless networks, Internet of Things and mobile devices. Specific research topics include wireless physical-layer security, security of next-generation networks, privacy-preserving data mining, location privacy and automated privacy protection. https://www.dcc.fc.up.pt/~joaovilela/

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Details

Details

  • Name

    João Paulo Vilela
  • Role

    Researcher
  • Since

    01st March 2020
002
Publications

2024

Privkit: A Toolkit of Privacy-Preserving Mechanisms for Heterogeneous Data Types

Authors
Cunha, M; Duarte, G; Andrade, R; Mendes, R; Vilela, JP;

Publication
PROCEEDINGS OF THE FOURTEENTH ACM CONFERENCE ON DATA AND APPLICATION SECURITY AND PRIVACY, CODASPY 2024

Abstract
With the massive data collection from different devices, spanning from mobile devices to all sorts of IoT devices, protecting the privacy of users is a fundamental concern. In order to prevent unwanted disclosures, several Privacy-Preserving Mechanisms (PPMs) have been proposed. Nevertheless, due to the lack of a standardized and universal privacy definition, configuring and evaluating PPMs is quite challenging, requiring knowledge that the average user does not have. In this paper, we propose a privacy toolkit - Privkit - to systematize this process and facilitate automated configuration of PPMs. Privkit enables the assessment of privacy-preserving mechanisms with different configurations, while allowing the quantification of the achieved privacy and utility level of various types of data. Privkit is open source and can be extended with new data types, corresponding PPMs, as well as privacy and utility assessment metrics and privacy attacks over such data. This toolkit is available through a Python Package with several state-of-the-art PPMs already implemented, and also accessible through a Web application. Privkit constitutes a unified toolkit that makes the dissemination of new privacy-preserving methods easier and also facilitates reproducibility of research results, through a repository of Jupyter Notebooks that enable reproduction of research results.

2024

Computation-Limited Signals: A Channel Capacity Regime Constrained by Computational Complexity

Authors
Queiroz, S; Vilela, JP; Monteiro, E;

Publication
IEEE COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS

Abstract
In this letter, we introduce the computation-limited (comp-limited) signals, a communication capacity regime where the computational complexity of signal processing is the primary constraint for communication performance, overriding factors such as power or bandwidth. We present the Spectro-Computational (SC) analysis, a novel mathematical framework designed to enhance classic concepts of information theory -such as data rate, spectral efficiency, and capacity - to accommodate the computational complexity overhead of signal processing. We explore a specific Shannon regime where capacity is expected to increase indefinitely with channel resources. However, we identify conditions under which the time complexity overhead can cause capacity to decrease rather than increase, leading to the definition of the comp-limited signal regime. Furthermore, we provide examples of SC analysis and demonstrate that the Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) waveform falls under the comp-limited regime unless the lower-bound computational complexity of the N-point Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) problem verifies as ohm (N)$ , which remains an open challenge in the theory of computation.

2024

A Privacy-Aware Remapping Mechanism for Location Data

Authors
Duarte, G; Cunha, M; Vilela, JP;

Publication
39TH ANNUAL ACM SYMPOSIUM ON APPLIED COMPUTING, SAC 2024

Abstract
In an era dominated by Location-Based Services (LBSs), the concern of preserving location privacy has emerged as a critical challenge. To address this, Location Privacy-Preserving Mechanisms (LPPMs) were proposed, in where an obfuscated version of the exact user location is reported instead. Adding to noise-based mechanisms, location discretization, the process of transforming continuous location data into discrete representations, is relevant for the efficient storage of data, simplifying the process of manipulating the information in a digital system and reducing the computational overhead. Apart from enabling a more efficient data storage and processing, location discretization can also be performed with privacy requirements, so as to ensure discretization while providing privacy benefits. In this work, we propose a Privacy-Aware Remapping mechanism that is able to improve the privacy level attained by Geo-Indistinguishability through a tailored pre-processing discretization step. The proposed remapping technique is capable of reducing the re-identification risk of locations under Geo-Indistinguishability, with limited impact on quality loss.

2023

Poster: Privacy-Preserving Joint Communication and Sensing

Authors
Martins, O; Vilela, JP; Gomes, M;

Publication
2023 IEEE 24TH INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON A WORLD OF WIRELESS, MOBILE AND MULTIMEDIA NETWORKS, WOWMOM

Abstract
With the recent advancements in wireless networks, Joint Communication and Sensing (JCAS) has become a growing field that is expected to be included in next-generation standards. However, not only is the current performance of the sensing ability still lacking to be used in real-world scenarios, proper security of such privacy-invasive technology has not been fully explored. To this end, we propose the creation of a more robust framework, capable of cross-domain detection and long-term analysis for improved detection, which will also serve as the basis for a security and privacy analysis of the threat landscape and solutions in this field.

2023

Velocity-Aware Geo-Indistinguishability

Authors
Mendes, R; Cunha, M; Vilela, JP;

Publication
CODASPY 2023 - Proceedings of the 13th ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy

Abstract
Location Privacy-Preserving Mechanisms (LPPMs) have been proposed to mitigate the risks of privacy disclosure yielded from location sharing. However, due to the nature of this type of data, spatio-temporal correlations can be leveraged by an adversary to extenuate the protections. Moreover, the application of LPPMs at collection time has been limited due to the difficulty in configuring the parameters and in understanding their impact on the privacy level by the end-user. In this work we adopt the velocity of the user and the frequency of reports as a metric for the correlation between location reports. Based on such metric we propose a generalization of Geo-Indistinguishability denoted Velocity-Aware Geo-Indistinguishability (VA-GI). We define a VA-GI LPPM that provides an automatic and dynamic trade-off between privacy and utility according to the velocity of the user and the frequency of reports. This adaptability can be tuned for general use, by using city or country-wide data, or for specific user profiles, thus warranting fine-grained tuning for users or environments. Our results using vehicular trajectory data show that VA-GI achieves a dynamic trade-off between privacy and utility that outperforms previous works. Additionally, by using a Gaussian distribution as estimation for the distribution of the velocities, we provide a methodology for configuring our proposed LPPM without the need for mobility data. This approach provides the required privacy-utility adaptability while also simplifying its configuration and general application in different contexts. © 2023 Owner/Author.

Supervised
thesis

2024

Privacy-Preserving Joint Communication and Sensing

Author
Óscar Gabriel Bernardes Martins

Institution
UP-FCUP

2023

Privacy-Preserving Mechanisms for Heterogeneous Data Types

Author
Mariana da Cruz Cunha

Institution
UP-FCUP

2023

Privacy in Telecom Fraud Detection

Author
Eduardo Carvalho Santos

Institution
UP-FCUP

2023

Increasing Data Capturing Abilities of HoneyNets: a Proof of Concept

Author
Diogo Miguel Marcos Ribeiro

Institution
UP-FCUP

2023

Privacy-Preserving Face Detection: A Comprehensive Analysis of Face Anonymization Techniques

Author
Ricardo Gonçalves de Andrade

Institution
UP-FCUP