Xiaodong Lin

Education and Employment Background

Dr. Xiaodong Lin received a PhD from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, China, and a PhD from the University of Waterloo. Lin went on to work as an Associate Professor at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology and as an Associate Professor at Wilfrid Laurier University before joining the University of Guelph’s School of Computer Science as an Associate Professor in 2019.

Research Themes

Lin’s research focuses on cyber security and forensics, particularly security and privacy in automated and connected vehicles, privacy enhancing techniques, and digital forensics. He has made extensive contributions to security and privacy research in the Vehicular Ad hoc Network (VANET) and digital forensics. Key areas of focus include:

1. Privacy enhancing techniques and their applications. Lin was the first to introduce the concept of conditional privacy for vehicular communications. Since then, conditional privacy has become a key design objective for secure and privacy-preserving protocols for vehicular communication. Lin also pioneered the idea of integrating cryptographic and privacy enhancing techniques with social theory—using social network analysis techniques to determine the most social or frequently visited locations by the public. Afterwards, Base Stations (or Roadside Units (RSUs)) deployed strategically in these locations assist in packet forwarding to achieve highly reliable transmissions and reduce the traceability for better user privacy. Also, Lin was the first to thoroughly investigate and demonstrate insecurity of existing pseudonym changing mechanisms, which is a key technology to protect location privacy in Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs).
2. Blockchain technology and its applications. Lin has extensive insights into striking a balance between blockchain scalability, on-chain storage privacy, and application feasibility. This experience is critical for many blockchain applications, for example, blockchain-based financial services because the stringent regulations on the collection, storage, exchange, and computations over the financial data may have privacy and regulatory concerns. Lin also has experience in the design and implementation of blockchain architectures, including the public Ethereum blockchain and the consortium permissioned blockchain.
3. Cyber forensics and threat intelligence. Lin has studied cloud forensics, mobile forensics, file system forensics and cryptocurrency transaction analysis. Also, his textbook “Introductory Computer Forensics: A Hands-on Practical Approach” published by Springer in 2018, has been used for undergraduate and graduate digital forensics courses in many universities around the world.

Highlights

• Best Paper Award, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) INFOCOM, 2018
• IEEE Fellow for contributions in secure and privacy-preserving vehicular communications, 2017
• Chair of IEEE Communications and Information Security Technical Committee, 2015-2016
• Associate Editor, IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, 2017-present 
• Associate Editor, IEEE Internet of Things Journal, 2017-present
• Annual Digital Forensic Research Conference (DFRWS USA) 2020, Program Co-Chair

Media Coverage

Privacy Enhancing Techniques

• CEPS Research Highlight: Safeguarding Privacy on Mobile Devices
• CEPS News: Technology that Drives Information Security