We are the EPFL Security and Privacy Engineering (SPRING) Lab. Our research focuses on the following topics:
- Machine Learning impact on society: Security, Privacy, Fairness
- Engineering privacy-preserving systems
- Frameworks for privacy evaluation
News and highlights
August 2025 Our papers Double-Edged Shield: On the Fingerprintability of Customized Ad Blockers and Characterizing and Detecting Propaganda-Spreading Accounts on Telegram appeared in USENIX Security 2025. The paper Characterizing and Detecting Propaganda-Spreading Accounts on Telegram won the “Distinguished Paper” award. Congrats Klim!
June 2025 Papers by our PhD students Saiid El Hajj Chehade (403 Forbidden? Ethically Evaluating Broken Access Control in the Wild) and Mathilde Raynal (On the Conflict Between Robustness and Learning in Collaborative Machine Learning) appeared in IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy 2025.
February 2025 Carmela has moved to the Max Planck institute on Security and Privacy where she is a Scientific Director. She is currently on leave from EPFL. Currently, the SPRING lab spans across two campus in Switzerland and Germany.
October 2024 Ana-Maria Cretu has received a Distinguished Reviewer Award for her service as a PC member at ACM CCS 2024!
May 2023 Carmela has been promoted as Associate Professor in the School of Computer and Communication Sciences at EPFL.
November 2022 Carmela has won the EPFL Latsis University Prize for exceptionally important contributions of her work.
July 2021 The paper describing Datashare Network, a decentralized search engine for journalists, designed in collaboration with ICIJ, was a runner up for the 2021 Caspar Bowden Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies.
June 2021 Our protocol CrowdNotifier will be integrated in SwissCovid. The paper describing the protocol will appear at PETS 2021. The specification of the protocol, and a number of variants to ease deployment can be found here.
January 2021 Our paper Angel or Devil? A Privacy Study of Mobile Parental Control Apps has received the Emilio Aced Award for Data Protection Research from the Spanish Data Protection Authority.
September 2020 The SPRING group has been heavily involved in the design of Decentralized Privacy-preserving Proximity Tracing (DP3T), which is the core of the SwissCovid app in Switzerland and has been adopted by Google and Apple as a basis for their Exposure Notification API. The code base implementing our additional mechanisms to protect privacy in the full system is used in other coutries’ apps such as Estonia (HOIA), Portugal (STAYAWAY), Spain (Radar Covid) or Ecuador (Asi)
August 2020 Carmela has been selected as 2020 40 under 40 emerging leaders on Technology by Fortune.
August 2020 The paper describing Datashare Network, a decentralized search engine for journalists, designed in collaboration with ICIJ, will appear at USENIX Security 2020. We are currently implementing the system and carrying out user studies to ensure swift deployment
Work with us
For prospective PhD students and Postdocs, please check our open positions. If you would like to do your semester project or thesis in the SPRING lab, please check our student project proposals. We are also open to consider other options. If you have an exciting idea which you want to work on, email us!