Gabriel Ghinita

Associate Professor
Department of Computer Science
University of Massachusetts at Boston


Office: Science Building, 3rd Floor, Room 88 (S-3-88)
Phone: (617) 287-6479
Email: Gabriel.Ghinita at umb.edu

  1. Bio
  2. Publications
  3. Research

I am an Associate Professor with the Department of Computer Science at University of Massachusetts, Boston. For the 2018/19 AY, I am on sabbatical leave as Visiting Associate Professor at the Computer Science department, University of Southern California. Prior to joining UMB in Fall 2011, I was a Research Associate affiliated with Purdue Cyber Center and Purdue Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS). My main research interests lie in the area of databases, with focus on information security and privacy. I am also interested in spatio-temporal databases and data management in large-scale distributed environments.


Research Interests


Teaching


Professional Activities


Education


My main research interests lie in the area of data security and privacy:

Books and Book Chapters

  1. G. Ghinita, "Privacy for Location-based Services", Synthesis Lectures on Information Security, Privacy, and Trust, Morgan & Claypool Publishers 2013

  2. E. Bertino, G. Ghinita and A. Kamra, "Access Control for Databases - Concepts and Systems", In Foundations and Trends in Databases, NOW Publishing, 2011

  3. P. Kalnis and G. Ghinita, "Spatial Anonymity", In Encyclopedia of Database Systems, Springer 2009

  4. P. Kalnis and G. Ghinita, "OLAP Results, Distributed Caching", In Encyclopedia of GIS, Springer 2008


Journal Articles

  1. M. Maruseac, G. Ghinita, "Precision-Enhanced Differentially-Private Mining of High-Confidence Association Rules" IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (IEEE TDSC), 2018

  2. H. To, G. Ghinita, L. Fan, C. Shahabi, "Differentially Private Location Protection for Worker Datasets in Spatial Crowdsourcing" IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing (IEEE TMC), 2017

  3. M. Maruseac, G. Ghinita, G. Trajcevski, P. Scheuermann, "Privacy-preserving detection of anomalous phenomena in crowdsourced environmental sensing using fine-grained weighted voting" Geoinformatica 2017

  4. M. Maruseac, G. Ghinita "Processing uncertain spatial data resulting from differentially-private sanitization”, ACM SIGSPATIAL Special, 2016

  5. G. Ghinita, M.L. Damiani, C. Silvestri, E. Bertino, "Protecting Against Velocity-based, Proximity-based and External Event Attacks in Location-Centric Social Networks" ACM Transactions on Spatial Algorithms and Systems (ACM TSAS), 2016

  6. S. Sultana, G. Ghinita, E. Bertino, M. Shehab, "A Lightweight Secure Scheme for Detecting Provenance Forgery and Packet Drop Attacks in Wireless Sensor Networks" IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (IEEE TDSC), 2015

  7. E. Bertino, G. Ghinita, M. Kantarcioglu, D. Nguyen, J. Park, R. S. Sandhu, S. Sultana, B. M. Thuraisingham, S. Xu, "A roadmap for privacy-enhanced secure data provenance" Journal of Intelligent Information Systems (JIIS), 2014

  8. S. Choi, G. Ghinita, H.-S. Lim, E. Bertino, "Secure kNN Query Processing in Untrusted Cloud Environments" IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (IEEE TKDE), 2014

  9. H. To, G. Ghinita, C. Shahabi, "A Framework for Protecting Worker Location Privacy in Spatial Crowdsourcing" Proceedings of Very Large Data Bases (PVLDB), 2014

  10. M. Kirkpatrick, G. Ghinita, E. Bertino, "Privacy-preserving Enforcement of Spatially Aware RBAC" IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (IEEE TDSC), Special Issue on Data and Application Security, 9(5), 627-640, 2012

  11. A. Inan, M. Kantarcioglu, G. Ghinita, E. Bertino, "A Hybrid Approach to Private Record Matching" IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (IEEE TDSC), 9(5), 684-698, 2012

  12. M. Kirkpatrick, G. Ghinita, E. Bertino, "Resilient Authenticated Execution of Critical Applications in Untrusted Environments" IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (IEEE TDSC), 9(4), 595-607, 2012

  13. G. Ghinita, P. Kalnis, Y. Tao, "Anonymous Publication of Sensitive Transactional Data" IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (IEEE TKDE), 23(2), 161-174, 2011

  14. G. Ghinita, P. Kalnis, M. Kantarcioglu, E. Bertino, "Approximate and Exact Hybrid Algorithms for Private Nearest-Neighbor Queries with Database Protection" Geoinformatica 15(4), 699-726, 2011

  15. G. Ghinita, K. Zhao, D. Papadias, P. Kalnis, "A Reciprocal Framework for Spatial k-Anonymity" Information Systems Journal (IS), 35(3), 299-314, 2010

  16. M.L. Yiu, G. Ghinita, C. Jensen, P. Kalnis, "Enabling Search Services on Outsourced Private Spatial Data" Very Large Data Bases Journal (VLDBJ), 19(3), 363-384, 2010

  17. G. Ghinita, P. Karras, P. Kalnis, N. Mamoulis, "A Framework for Efficient Data Anonymization under Privacy and Accuracy Constraints" ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS), 34(2), 2009

  18. G. Ghinita, "Private Queries and Trajectory Anonymization: a Dual Perspective on Location Privacy" Transactions on Data Privacy (TDP), 2(1), 3-19, 2009

  19. P. Kalnis, G. Ghinita, K. Mouratidis, D. Papadias, "Preventing Location-Based Identity Inference in Anonymous Spatial Queries", IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (IEEE TKDE), 19(12), 1719-1733, 2007


Conference Papers

  1. R. Ahuja, G. Ghinita, C. Shahabi "Differentially-Private Next-Location Prediction with Neural Networks" In Proceedings of International Conference on Extending Database Technology (EDBT), March 2020

  2. K. Nguyen, G. Ghinita, C. Shahabi "A Privacy-Preserving, Accountable and Spam-Resilient Geo-Marketplace" In Proceedings of ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS, November 2019

  3. R. Ahuja, G. Ghinita, N. Krishna, C. Shahabi "Protecting against Inference Attacks on Co-Location Data" In Proceedings of International Conference on Computer Communication and Networks (ICCCN), July 2019

  4. R. Ahuja, G. Ghinita, C. Shahabi "A Utility-Preserving and Scalable Technique for Protecting Location Data with Geo-Indistinguishability" In Proceedings of International Conference on Extending Database Technology (EDBT), March 2019

  5. X Wu, C. Xu, Y. Luo, C.Bumgardner, G. Ghinita, M. McGarry: "AMIS: Programmable Privacy-Preserving Network Measurement for Analysis and Troubleshooting" In Proceedings of Integrated Network and Service Management (IM), April 2019

  6. F.-Y. Rao, G. Ghinita, E, Bertino, "Hybrid Differentially-Private String Matching" In Proceedings of International Conference on Distributed Computer Systems (ICDCS), July 2018

  7. X. Yi, F.-Y. Rao, G. Ghinita, E, Bertino, "Privacy-Preserving Spatial Crowdsourcing Based on Anonymous Credentials" In Proceedings of International Conference on Mobile Data Management (MDM), July 2018

  8. O. G. Niculaescu, G. Ghinita, "An Empirical Study of Differentially-Private Analytics for High-Speed Network Data." In Proceedings of ACM Conference on Data and Applications Security (ACM CODASPY), March 2018

  9. J. Yang, O. G. Niculaescu, G. Ghinita "A Game-Oriented Educational Tool for Location Privacy Topics" In Proceedings of ACM International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS), November 2017

  10. O. G. Niculaescu, G. Ghinita, M. Maruseac "Differentially-Private Big Data Analytics for High-Speed Research Network Traffic Measurement" In Proceedings of ACM Conference on Data and Applications Security (ACM CODASPY), March 2017

  11. M. Maruseac, G. Ghinita, "Differentially-Private Mining of Representative Travel Patterns" (Best Student Paper Award) In Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Mobile Data Management (IEEE MDM), June 2016

  12. M. Maruseac, G. Ghinita, "Privacy-Preserving Mining of Sequential Association Rules from Provenance Workflows" In Proceedings of ACM Conference on Data and Applications Security (ACM CODASPY), March 2016

  13. M. Maruseac, G. Ghinita, B. Avci, G. Trajcevski, P. Scheuermann, "Privacy-Preserving Detection of Anomalous Phenomena in Crowdsourced Environmental Sensing" In Proceedings of International Symposium on Spatial and Temporal Databases (SSTD), August 2015

  14. M. Maruseac, G. Ghinita, M. Ouyang, R. Rughinis, "Hardware acceleration of Private Information Retrieval protocols using GPUs" In Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Application-specific Systems, Architectures and Processors (IEEE ASAP), July 2015

  15. H. To, G. Ghinita, C. Shahabi, "PrivGeoCrowd: A toolbox for studying private spatial Crowdsourcing" In Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (IEEE ICDE), April 2015

  16. M. Maruseac, G. Ghinita, "Differentially-Private Mining of Moderately-Frequent High-Confidence Association Rules" In Proceedings of ACM Conference on Data and Applications Security (ACM CODASPY), March 2015

  17. S. Choi, G. Ghinita, E. Bertino, "Secure Mutual Proximity Zone Enclosure Evaluation" In Proceedings of ACM International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS), November 2014

  18. M. Maruseac, G. Ghinita, M. Ouyang, R. Rughinis, "Towards Efficient Private Spatial Information Retrieval Using GPUs" In Proceedings of ACM International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS), November 2014

  19. J. Zhang, G. Ghinita, C.-Y. Chow, "Differentially Private Location Recommendations in Geosocial Networks" In Proceedings of International Conference on Mobile Data Management (MDM), July 2014

  20. W. Lin, X. Xiao, G. Ghinita, "Large-Scale Frequent Subgraph Mining in MapReduce" In Proceedings of International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), April 2014

  21. G. Ghinita, R. Rughinis, "An efficient privacy-preserving system for monitoring mobile users: making searchable encryption practical" (Outstanding Paper Award) In Proceedings of ACM Conference on Data and Applications Security (CODASPY), March 2014

  22. M. Maruseac, G. Ghinita, R. Rughinis, "Privacy-preserving publication of provenance workflows" In Proceedings of ACM Conference on Data and Applications Security (CODASPY), March 2014

  23. G. Ghinita, R. Rughinis, "A privacy-preserving location-based alert system" In Proceedings of International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS), November 2013

  24. J. Cao, Q. Xiao, G. Ghinita, N. Li, E. Bertino, K.-L. Tan, "Efficient and accurate strategies for differentially-private sliding window queries" In Proceedings of International Conference on Extending Database Technology (EDBT), March 2013

  25. H. Lo, G. Ghinita, "Authenticating spatial skyline queries with low communication overhead" In Proceedings of ACM Conference on Data and Applications Security (CODASPY), February 2013

  26. S. Sultana, G. Ghinita, E. Bertino "A Lightweight Secure Provenance Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks" In Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Systems (ICPADS), December 2012

  27. S. Choi, G. Ghinita, E. Bertino "Secure Sensor Network SUM Aggregation with Detection of Malicious Nodes" (best-paper award runner-up) In Proceedings of IEEE Conference on Local Computer Networks (LCN), October 2012

  28. H.-S. Lim, G. Ghinita, E. Bertino, M. Kantarcioglu "A Game-Theoretic Approach for High-Assurance of Data Trustworthiness in Sensor Networks" In Proceedings of International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), April 2012

  29. C. Dai, F.-Y. Rao, G. Ghinita, E. Bertino, "Privacy-Preserving Assessment of Location Data Trustworthiness" In Proceedings of International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS), November 2011

  30. E. Bertino, G. Ghinita, "Towards Mechanisms for Detection and Prevention of Data Exfiltration by Insiders" In Proceedings of ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (ASIACCS) (invited paper), March 2011

  31. K. Brancik, G. Ghinita "The optimization of situational awareness for insider threat detection" In Proceedings of ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy (CODASPY), February 2011

  32. G. Ghinita, C. R. Vicente, N. Shang, E. Bertino, "Privacy-Preserving Matching of Spatial Datasets with Protection against Background Knowledge" In Proceedings of International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS), November 2010

  33. S. Choi, G. Ghinita, E. Bertino, "A Privacy-Enhancing Content-Based Publish/Subscribe System using Scalar Product Preserving Transformations" In Proceedings of International Conference on Database and Expert Systems Applications (DEXA), August 2010

  34. G. Ghinita, M. Azarmi, E. Bertino, "Privacy-aware Location-Aided Routing in Mobile Ad-hoc Networks" In Proceedings of International Conference on Mobile Data Management (MDM), May 2010

  35. A. Inan, M. Kantarcioglu, G. Ghinita, E. Bertino, "Private Record Matching Using Differential Privacy" In Proceedings of International Conference on Extending Database Technology (EDBT), March 2010

  36. N. Shang, G. Ghinita, Y. Zhou, E. Bertino, "Controlling Data Disclosure in Computational PIR Protocols" In Proceedings of ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (ASIACCS), April 2010

  37. G. Ghinita, M. L. Damiani, C. Silvestri, E. Bertino, "Preventing Velocity-based Linkage Attacks in Location-Aware Applications" (best-paper award runner-up) In Proceedings of International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS), November 2009

  38. C. Dai, G. Ghinita, E. Bertino, J.-W. Byun, N. Li, "TIAMAT: a Tool for Interactive Analysis of Microdata Anonymization Techniques" In Proceedings of International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB), August 2009 (demo track)

  39. G. Ghinita, P. Kalnis, M. Kantarcioglu, E. Bertino, "A Hybrid Technique for Private Location-Based Queries with Database Protection" In Proceedings of International Symposium on Spatial and Temporal Databases (SSTD), July 2009

  40. P. Rao, G. Ghinita, E. Bertino, J. Lobo, "Visualizing Access Control Policy Analysis Results" In Proceedings of International Symposium on Policies for Distributed Systems and Networks (POLICY), July 2009

  41. G. Ghinita, M. L. Damiani, E. Bertino, C. Silvestri, "Interactive Location Cloaking with the PROBE Obfuscator" In Proceedings of International Conference on Mobile Data Management (MDM), May 2009 (demo track)

  42. M. L. Yiu, G. Ghinita, C. Jensen, P. Kalnis, "Outsourcing of Private Spatial Data for Search Services", In Proceedings of International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE) March 2009

  43. G. Ghinita, P. Kalnis, A. Khoshgozaran, C. Shahabi, K.-L.Tan, "Private Queries in Location Based Services: Anonymizers are not Necessary", In Proceedings of ACM SIGMOD Conference June 2008

  44. G. Ghinita, Y. Tao, P. Kalnis "On the Anonymization of Sparse High-Dimensional Data", In Proceedings of International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE) April 2008

  45. N. Vyahhi, S. Bakiras, P. Kalnis, G. Ghinita "Tracking Moving Objects in Anonymized Trajectories", In Proceedings of International Conference on Database and Expert Systems Applications (DEXA) September 2008

  46. K. Bharath, G. Ghinita, P. Kalnis "Privacy-Preserving Publication of User Locations in the Proximity of Sensitive Sites", In Proceedings of International Conference on Scientific and Statistical Database Management (SSDBM) July 2008

  47. G. Ghinita, P. Karras, P. Kalnis, N. Mamoulis, "Fast Data Anonymization with Low Information Loss", In Proceedings of International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB) September 2007

  48. G. Ghinita, P. Kalnis, S. Skiadopoulos, "MobiHide: A Mobile Peer-to-Peer System for Anonymous Location-Based Queries", In Proceedings of International Symposium on Spatial and Temporal Databases (SSTD) July 2007

  49. G. Ghinita, P. Kalnis, S. Skiadopoulos, "PRIVE: Anonymous Location-Based Queries in Distributed Mobile Systems", In Proceedings of International World Wide Web Conference (WWW) May 2007

  50. G. Ghinita, Y.M. Teo, "An Adaptive Stabilization Framework for Distributed Hash Tables", In Proceedings of IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS) April 2006


Workshop Papers

  1. S. Costea, G. Ghinita, D. M. Barbu, R. Rughinis, "A Comparative Evaluation of Private Information Retrieval Techniques in Location-Based Services", In Proceedings of International Workshop on Secure Internet of Things (SIOT), 2012

  2. E.-A. Cho, G. Ghinita, E. Bertino, "Privacy-Preserving Similarity Measurement for Access Control Policies", In Proceedings of ACM Workshop on Digital Identity Management (DIM), 2010

  3. C.R. Vicente, M. Kirkpatrick, G. Ghinita, E. Bertino, C. Jensen, "Requirements and Challenges of Location-Based Access Control in Healthcare Emergency Response", In Proceedings of SIGSPATIAL ACM GIS International Workshop on Security and Privacy in GIS and LBS (SPRINGL), 2009

  4. G. Ghinita, "Understanding the Privacy-Efficiency Trade-off in Location Based Queries", In Proceedings of SIGSPATIAL ACM GIS International Workshop on Security and Privacy in GIS and LBS (SPRINGL), 2008 (invited paper - keynote)


Funded Projects