Dr. Ellis Fenske

Assistant Professor of Cyber Science

United States Naval Academy

Research Interests

Broadly, I am interested in privacy and anonymity in the modern digital world. I'm very interested in how a theoretical approach to problems can help us to understand or grapple with often unanticipated privacy concerns as they appear in practice.

I primarily work on Anonymous Communication and practical privacy technology, and related areas:

  • Fingerprinting attacks
  • Location Privacy in Mobile Devices
  • Information Theory and Statistics
  • Path Selection in Tor
  • Quantifying Anonymity
  • Privacy-Preserving Measurements
  • Distributing Trust
  • Social and Ethical issues around Privacy and Anonymity
I'm also interested in:
  • Category Theory and Programming Language Semantics
  • Cryptography
  • Mathematical Logic
I'm happy to talk to Midshipmen interested in any of these areas

Refereed Publications

  1. Ellis Fenske. Optimal lower bounds on the accuracy of path selection fingerprinting attacks by generalized link adversaries in anonymous routing networks. In preparation.
  2. Travis Mayberry, Ellis Fenske, Dane Brown, Jeremy Martin, Christine Fossaceca, Erik Rye, and Lucas Foppe. Who Tracks the Trackers? Circumventing Apple's Anti-Tracking Alerts in the Find My Network. 20th Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society (WPES). November, 2021.
  3. Ellis Fenske, Akshaya Mani, Aaron Johnson, Micah Sherr. Accountable Private Set Cardinality for Distributed Measurement. ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security (TOPS). Accepted. 2021
  4. Ellis Fenske, Dane Brown, Jeremy Martin, Travis Mayberry, Peter Ryan, and Erik Rye. Three Years Later: A Study of MAC Address Randomization in Mobile Devices And When It Succeeds. Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETS). July, 2021.
  5. Jeremy Martin, Douglas Alpuche, Kristina Bodeman, Lamont Brown, Ellis Fenske, Lucas Foppe, Travis Mayberry, Erik Rye, Brandon Sipes, Sam Teplov. Handoff All Your Privacy – A Review of Apple’s Bluetooth Low Energy Continuity Protocol. Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETS). July, 2019.
  6. Ellis Fenske*, Akshaya Mani*, Aaron Johnson, Micah Sherr. Distributed Measurement with Private Set-Union Cardinality. ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), November 2017. (*Co-First Authors)