Arvind Narayanan


Arvind Narayanan is a computer scientist and an associate professor at Princeton University. Narayanan is recognized for his research in the de-anonymization of data.

Biography

Narayanan received technical degrees from Indian Institute of Technology Madras in 2004. C. Pandu Rangan was his advisor. Narayanan received his PhD in computer science in University of Texas at Austin in 2009 under Vitaly Shmatikov. He worked briefly as a post-doctoral researcher at Stanford University, working closely with Dan Boneh. Narayanan moved to Princeton University where he has been an assistant professor since September 2012.

Career

In 2006 Netflix began the Netflix Prize competition for better collaborative filtering algorithms. That business gave out "anonymous" customer information. However, Narayanan and advisor Vitaly Shmatikov showed possibilities for "de-anonymizing" this information. This research led to much higher recognition of "de-anonymizing." In later working Narayanan has de-anonymized graphs from social networking and writings from blogs.
In mid-2010, Narayanan and Jonathan Mayer argued to the favor of Do Not Track in HTTP headers. They built prototypes of Do Not Track for clients and servers. Working with Mozilla they wrote the influential Internet Engineering Task Force Internet Draft of Do Not Track.
Narayanan wrote about software cultures. He argues for ethics teaching in the computer science schooling and usable cryptography.

Awards