Emiliano De Cristofaro

Emiliano De Cristofaro
Education
  • University of Salerno (BSc)
  • University of California, Irvine (PhD)
Known for
  • Privacy-enhancing technologies
  • Trustworthy machine learning
  • Research on online harms and disinformation
Awards
  • ACM IMC Distinguished Paper Award (2018)
  • ISOC NDSS Distinguished Paper Award (2018)
  • ACM CSCW Impact Recognition Award (2021)
  • ACM Distinguished Member (2024)
  • IEEE S&P Distinguished Paper Award (2025)
Scientific career
Fields
Workplaces
  • University of California, Riverside
  • University College London
  • PARC (company)
Thesis Sharing Sensitive Information with Privacy  (2011)
Gene Tsudik
Websiteemilianodc.com

Emiliano De Cristofaro is an Italian computer scientist and Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Riverside.[1] His research focuses on security and privacy-enhancing technologies, trustworthy machine learning, and the measurement of online harms.[2] In 2024 he was named a Distinguished Member of the Association for Computing Machinery.[3]

Education

De Cristofaro received a five-year BSc Honors degree (summa cum laude) in computer science from the University of Salerno, Italy, in 2005.[4] He completed a PhD in Networked Systems at the University of California, Irvine in 2011, under the supervision of Gene Tsudik; his dissertation was titled Sharing Sensitive Information with Privacy.[4]

Career

Before joining academia, De Cristofaro was a member of the research staff at PARC (a Xerox company) from 2011 to 2013.[2] In October 2013, he joined University College London (UCL) as a Senior Lecturer, becoming Reader in 2017 and full Professor of Security and Privacy Enhancing Technologies in 2019.[4] At UCL, he served as Head of the Information Security Research Group from 2018 to 2022 and as Director of the UK Academic Centre of Excellence in Cyber Security Research from 2019 to 2023.[5] Between 2019 and 2022, he was a member of the Technology Advisory Panel of the UK Information Commissioner's Office.[2] He has also been a Faculty Fellow at The Alan Turing Institute, the UK's national institute for data science and artificial intelligence,[2]

In 2023, he moved to the University of California, Riverside as Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering.[1]. In 2017, he co-founded the iDRAMA Lab, an international research collective studying online communities and information weaponization.[4]

Research

De Cristofaro's research spans applied cryptography, privacy-enhancing technologies, trustworthy machine learning, and the empirical study of online harms.[2] As of 2026, according to Google Scholar, his work has been cited more than 20,000 times, and he has an h-index of 68.[6]

His earlier work focused on private set intersection and other cryptographic protocols for privacy-preserving computation, including techniques for securely testing human genomes.[7][8] He subsequently contributed to the study of membership inference attacks on machine learning models, including the 2017 paper "LOGAN: Membership Inference Attacks Against Generative Models" and the 2019 IEEE S&P paper "Exploiting Unintended Feature Leakage in Collaborative Learning".[9] In 2025, with his student Georgi Ganev, he showed that synthetic datasets described as anonymous remained vulnerable to privacy attacks, arguing that similarity-based privacy metrics are inadequate.[10]

Together with collaborators including Jeremy Blackburn, Gianluca Stringhini, and Savvas Zannettou, De Cristofaro has carried out large-scale measurement studies of fringe online communities. A 2017 study analysed 4chan's /pol/ ("Politically Incorrect") board and its influence on the wider web.[11][12] His 2018 paper "On the Origins of Memes by Means of Fringe Web Communities", which received a distinguished paper award at the Internet Measurement Conference, traced how memes spread across web communities.[13][14]

De Cristofaro and collaborators have also studied state-sponsored troll accounts on Twitter,[15] the QAnon conspiracy theory on Reddit and Voat,[16] the Parler social network in the period around the January 6 Capitol attack,[17] the effects of platform migration after the banning of the subreddit r/The_Donald,[18] and the toxicity of the manosphere.[19][20] His data-driven research has also addressed the automated detection of cyberbullying on social media,[21] the operation of fake-engagement "like farms",[22] and the measurement of internet censorship.[23]

Awards and honors

In 2024, De Cristofaro was named a Distinguished Member of the Association for Computing Machinery for "contributions to privacy-enhancing technologies and internet measurement".[3][24][25]

His co-authored papers have received distinguished paper or best paper awards at venues including the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (2025),[10][26] the Internet Measurement Conference (2018),[27] the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (2018),[28] and the ACM Web Science Conference (2023),[29] as well as an impact recognition award at the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (2021).[30]

His privacy research has also received the 2017 Data Protection by Design Award from the Catalan Data Protection Authority,[31] and was runner-up for the INRIA–CNIL Privacy Protection Award in 2019.[32]

Selected publications

  • Pyrgelis, Apostolos; Troncoso, Carmela; De Cristofaro, Emiliano (2018). "Knock Knock, Who's There? Membership Inference on Aggregate Location Data". Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS).
  • Melis, Luca; Song, Congzheng; De Cristofaro, Emiliano; Shmatikov, Vitaly (2019). "Exploiting Unintended Feature Leakage in Collaborative Learning". IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy.
  • Zannettou, Savvas; Caulfield, Tristan; De Cristofaro, Emiliano; Sirivianos, Michael; Stringhini, Gianluca; Suarez-Tangil, Guillermo (2018). "On the Origins of Memes by Means of Fringe Web Communities". ACM Internet Measurement Conference.
  • Ganev, Georgi; De Cristofaro, Emiliano (2025). "The Inadequacy of Similarity-based Privacy Metrics: Privacy Attacks against 'Truly Anonymous' Synthetic Datasets". IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy.

References

  1. 1 2 "UCR welcomes 52 new faculty members". Inside UCR. University of California, Riverside. 16 October 2023. Retrieved 28 May 2026.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 "Emiliano De Cristofaro". The Alan Turing Institute. Retrieved 28 May 2026.
  3. 1 2 "ACM Distinguished Members – Emiliano De Cristofaro". Association for Computing Machinery. Retrieved 28 May 2026.
  4. 1 2 3 4 "The Inaugural Lecture of Professor Emiliano De Cristofaro". UCL Computer Science. University College London. Retrieved 28 May 2026.
  5. ↑ "Emiliano De Cristofaro". REPHRAIN. Retrieved 28 May 2026.
  6. ↑ "Emiliano De Cristofaro – Google Scholar". Google Scholar. Retrieved 17 Aug 2026.
  7. ↑ "Want to keep your genome safe? There's an app for that". New Scientist. 2013. Retrieved 28 May 2026.
  8. ↑ "DNA Data Security and You". MIT Technology Review. 2013. Retrieved 28 May 2026.
  9. ↑ "Emiliano De Cristofaro". DBLP. Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz Center for Informatics. Retrieved 28 May 2026.
  10. 1 2 "CSE Professor Emiliano De Cristofaro and his student received Distinguished Paper Award in IEEE Security and Privacy 2025". Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of California, Riverside. 22 May 2025. Retrieved 28 May 2026.
  11. ↑ Bohannon, John (June 2017). "Shining a light on the dark corners of the web". Nature. Retrieved 28 May 2026.
  12. ↑ "How Much Attention Should Extremists Get?". The Atlantic. November 2017. Retrieved 28 May 2026.
  13. ↑ "Where memes come from". BBC News. 18 October 2018. Retrieved 28 May 2026.
  14. ↑ "This is where internet memes come from". MIT Technology Review. 2018. Retrieved 28 May 2026.
  15. ↑ "Russia's troll farms aren't just spreading misinformation – they're being studied". Wired UK. Retrieved 28 May 2026.
  16. ↑ "QAnon posts by figurehead Q may be written by more than one person". New Scientist. Retrieved 28 May 2026.
  17. ↑ "'Civil war' during Trump's pre-riot speech: Parler talk grew darker". USA Today. 1 February 2021. Retrieved 28 May 2026.
  18. ↑ "Why The_Donald moderator left". The Washington Post. 5 February 2021. Retrieved 28 May 2026.
  19. ↑ "Manosphere incel communities online more toxic, data research shows". Newsweek. Retrieved 28 May 2026.
  20. ↑ "The manosphere is getting more toxic as angry men join the incels". MIT Technology Review. 2020. Retrieved 28 May 2026.
  21. ↑ "New algorithm spots Twitter bullies with 90% accuracy". Sky News. 2019. Retrieved 28 May 2026.
  22. ↑ "The hidden world of Facebook "like farms"". MIT Technology Review. 2014. Retrieved 28 May 2026.
  23. ↑ "Syria regime filtering study". The Register. 28 November 2014. Retrieved 28 May 2026.
  24. ↑ "ACM Member News". Communications of the ACM. October 2025. Retrieved 28 May 2026.
  25. ↑ "CRA Congratulates New AAAI, ACM, and IEEE Fellows and ACM Distinguished Members". Computing Research News. Computing Research Association. March 2025. Retrieved 28 May 2026.
  26. ↑ "Awards". IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy 2025. Retrieved 28 May 2026.
  27. ↑ "Awards". ACM Internet Measurement Conference 2018. ACM SIGCOMM. Retrieved 28 May 2026.
  28. ↑ "NDSS Symposium 2018". Network and Distributed System Security Symposium. Retrieved 28 May 2026.
  29. ↑ "Best Paper of WebSci'23 Awarded". ACM Web Science Conference 2023. Retrieved 28 May 2026.
  30. ↑ "Awards". ACM CSCW 2021. Association for Computing Machinery. Retrieved 28 May 2026.
  31. ↑ "2017 Data Protection by Design Award". Catalan Data Protection Authority (APDCAT). Retrieved 28 May 2026.
  32. ↑ "INRIA and CNIL Award – 2019 Privacy Protection Prize". Commission nationale de l'informatique et des libertés (CNIL). Retrieved 28 May 2026.
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