Search

How different are search engines? The search engine wars are a favorite topic of on-line analysts, as two of the biggest companies in the world, Google and Microsoft, battle for prevalence of the web search space. Differences in search engine popularity can be explained by their effectiveness or other factors, such as familiarity with the most popular first engine, peer imitation, or force of habit. In this work we present a thorough analysis of the affinity of the two major search engines, Google and Bing, along with DuckDuckGo, which goes to great lengths to emphasize its privacy-friendly credentials. To do so, we collected search results using a comprehensive set of 300 unique queries for two time periods in 2016 and 2019, and developed a new similarity metric that leverages both the content and the ranking of search responses. We evaluated the characteristics of the metric against other metrics and approaches that have been proposed in the literature, and used it to (1) investigate the similarities of search engine results, (2) the evolution of their affinity over time, (3) what aspects of the results influence similarity, and (4) how the metric differs over different kinds of search services. We found that Google stands apart, but Bing and DuckDuckGo are largely indistinguishable from each other.

A shuffle argument is a cryptographic primitive for proving correct behaviour of mix-networks without leaking any private information. Several recent constructions of non-interactive shuffle arguments avoid the random oracle model but require the public key to be trusted.

While the revolutionary cloud computing paradigm offers substantial benefits to businesses, recent data breaches and the lack of dedicated end-to-end security solutions refrain the rapid adoption of this technology. The TREDISEC project aims at increasing trust in cloud computing by designing new security primitives ensuring data security and user privacy and supporting the underlying storage and computation technology at the same time.

Zeus is an internet voting platform, in which all the steps of the voting process can be verified using well-established mathematical tools. It has been developed with the goal that the voters can be confident that their votes are counted correctly and their anonymity is guaranteed, without needing to trust the operators of Zeus that they do not behave improperly: the assurances provided by Zeus are at least as strong as those in traditional elections. Zeus has been used in more than 120 elections, involving more than 22000 voters, and is continuously in use. It has shown that it can be used when traditional elections cannot take place, due to hostile conditions, and is actively being developed and evolved.