Hello!

I’m a PhD student at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS).

I work in the Distributed Systems and Security & Privacy groups, where I am co-advised by Peter Druschel and Deepak Garg. So it probably goes without saying, but I’m broadly interested in distributed systems, mobile systems, and security and privacy. In particular, I enjoy designing, building, and analyzing secure and privacy-preserving distributed systems.

Recently, I have been working on a secure selective analytics (SSA) platform with applications in the interest of the public good. This platform is secure under a strong threat model that leverages Multi-Party Computation (MPC) to place trust on a set of independent Trusted Execution Environments. This platform is selective as it allows data sources to a priori restrict the use of their sensitive data to a pre-defined set of queries, run by specific analysts, and for a limited period. Currently, I am working on extending its use cases to support practical MPC-based ML training over very large sensitive datasets under the same threat model.

At the beginning of my PhD, I explored different areas such as network side channels and secure mobile systems: I collaborated on Pacer, a project aimed to ensure data privacy in Cloud services against network side-channel leaks, and enClosure, a project on secure and private communication enabled by chains of mobile encounters. To continue the latter, I’m also working on a project that employs secure mobile encounters in a location-proof service, in order to mitigate the issue of fake online reviews.

Besides research, I’m quite enthusiastic about a bunch of things: traveling, cinema, books, comics, food, complaining, and complaining about food – especially if claimed to be Italian. I also enjoy learning new things: right now I’m trying (and failing) to learn Deutsch!