Keynote Information
For PETS 2026, we will have a set of keynotes. Find their information below.
Keynote by Franziska Roesner
Title: Privacy and Ads on the Emerging Agentic Web
Abstract: Over the last two or more decades, a key privacy issue on the web has been the collection and use of data in the context of targeted advertising. Members of the computer security and privacy research community (and adjacent communities) have done substantial work over that time to characterize (and improve) this ecosystem and its risks, including: assessing the privacy implications of online tracking and ad targeting, studying problematic (e.g., manipulative or adversarial) ad content and ad targeting, and exploring privacy-preserving ad mechanisms. In this talk, I will first overview research findings and ecosystem developments around privacy and the online advertising ecosystem up until now. Then, I will look to the future in this era of generative AI, considering how tracking and advertising may manifest in the emerging “agentic web” — in which users interact substantially with AI agents, and agents interact directly with other web content — and how the landscape of privacy and related risks may evolve.
Franziska Roesner
Franziska (Franzi) Roesner is the Brett Helsel Professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, where she co-directs the Security and Privacy Research Lab. Her research focuses broadly on computer security and privacy for end users of existing and emerging technologies. Her work has studied topics including online tracking and advertising, security and privacy for marginalized and/or vulnerable user groups, security and privacy in emerging augmented reality (AR) and IoT platforms, and online trust and safety. She is the recipient of a Google Security and Privacy Research Award and a Google Research Scholar Award, a Consumer Reports Digital Lab Fellowship, an MIT Technology Review "Innovators Under 35" Award, an Emerging Leader Alumni Award from the University of Texas at Austin, and an NSF CAREER Award. She has received paper awards or runners-up at the USENIX Security Symposium, the IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy, the Internet Measurement Conference, the WebConf, the Annual Privacy Forum, and the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems; as well as Test of Time Awards at NSDI, the IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy, and USENIX Security. She currently serves on the USENIX Security steering committee. She received her PhD from the University of Washington in 2014 and her BS from UT Austin in 2008.
Keynote by John Scott Railton
Title: TBA
Keynote by Fredrik Strömberg
Title: Managing complexity
Abstract: What is strategy, innovation, and cybersecurity? What is trust and trustworthiness? What design principles are useful for managing complexity - in computer systems, organizations, and life? I have tried to answer these questions for almost two decades, driven by insatiable curiosity and at times unhealthy perfectionism.
This talk is about the journey so far, more and less successful attempts at supporting and doing research, the principles that guide me and my companies, and the meaning of "good enough".
Fredrik Strömberg
Fredrik Strömberg is co-CEO at Mullvad VPN and Head of Research at the Amagicom group, consisting of Mullvad VPN, Tillitis and Glasklar Teknik. His main interest for the past decade has been the design and construction of more trustworthy computer systems. Together with colleagues and collaborators he has worked on the open-source projects System Transparency, Sigsum, Tillitis TKey, Tillitis HSM as well as open-source silicon and other open-source software and hardware-related internal research projects.
Together with his friend Daniel Berntsson he founded Amagicom AB and Mullvad VPN, 17 years ago. His interests in computer security, strategy and creativity started a decade before that, in no small part thanks to his surroundings. Today he's a proud fourth-generation business owner and third-generation inventor.
Mullvad was founded with the vision of making mass surveillance and online censorship ineffective, using entrepreneurship as a method for direct political action. Fredrik and Daniel has consistently refused outside investment in order to retain long term strategic flexibility, and re-invest much of Mullvad's profits in research and open-source software and hardware projects.
