Dr Joss Wright

Joss Wright's research interests lie in cryptography, privacy-enhancing technologies and anonymous communications. His current research focuses on analysing Internet censorship, and data anonymization.

Email: joss.wright@oii.ox.ac.uk
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Dr Joss Wright gained his PhD in Computer Science at the University of York, where his work focused on the description and analysis of anonymous communication mechanisms. Following this, he spent time at the University of Siegen in Germany examining security and privacy issues in cloud computing.

Joss’s interests lie in the area of anonymous and censorship-resistant communications, cryptographic fundamentals and in the wider field of privacy enhancing technologies, their applications and their implications.

At the OII, Joss is working on the “Being There” project, which looks at privacy in public spaces, and a Google-funded project analysing Internet censorship.

Areas of Interest for Doctoral Supervision

Censorship, computational social science, cryptography, ethics, governance, privacy, public policy, security, surveillance, machine learning

Research interests

Internet censorship, privacy, anonymity, cryptography, security, social implications of surveillance and privacy technologies, data minimisation

Positions held at the OII

  • Research Fellow, November 2012 –
  • Fresnel Research Fellow, January 2010 – November 2012

Students supervised at the OII

Current students


Latest blog posts

Current projects

  • Economic Geographies of the Darknet

    Participants: Professor Mark Graham, Dr Joss Wright, Martin Dittus

    This project will investigate the economic geographies of illegal economic activities in anonymous internet marketplaces.

  • Oxford Martin Programme on the Illegal Wildlife Trade

    Participants: Dr Joss Wright

    This project will develop an international hub to track and analyse the global illegal wildlife trade, both online and offline, and develop strategies to reduce the threat of the trade through social policy interventions.

Past projects

  • Digital Personhood: Being There: Humans and Robots in Public Spaces (HARPS)

    Participants: Professor Ian Brown, Dr Joss Wright, Guy Piers O'Hanlon

    This project considers the challenges of having robot proxies in public spaces. It will conduct experiments exploring trust in shared social settings, and develop a framework for understanding the impact of privacy / anonymity in human-robot interactions.

  • Ethical Privacy Guidelines for Mobile Connectivity Measurements

    Participants: Professor Ian Brown, Dr Joss Wright, Ben Zevenbergen, Dr David Erdos

    This project is developing concrete guidance with regards to privacy and data protection for researchers using Internet measurement tools for mobile phones in a usable and understandable format.

  • FRESNEL: Federated Secure Sensor Network Laboratory

    Participants: Professor Ian Brown, Dr Joss Wright, Guy Piers O'Hanlon

    FRESNEL aims to build a large scale federated sensor network framework with multiple applications sharing the same resources, where reliable intra-application communication is guaranteed, as well as a scalable and distributed management infrastructure.

  • Future Home Networks and Services

    Participants: Professor Ian Brown, Dr Joss Wright, Guy Piers O'Hanlon, Dr Andrew Martin

    This project is addressing home network and service security by researching and developing security frameworks for sharing between networks and devices, protocols to connect devices with cloud services, and security analysis of remote management systems.

  • IMSK: Integrated Mobile Security Kit

    Participants: Dr Anne-Marie Oostveen, Professor Ian Brown, Dr Joss Wright

    IMSK integrates information from legacy and novel sensor technologies into common operational picture where information is fused into intelligence, in a mobile system suitable for rapid deployment at venues which temporarily need enhanced security.

  • SUBITO: Surveillance of Unattended Baggage and the Identification and Tracking of the Owner

    Participants: Professor Ian Brown, Dr Joss Wright

    SUBITO is designed to research and further develop automated real time detection of abandoned luggage, fast identification of the individual responsible and his/her subsequent path and current location.

Conference papers

  • Darer, A., Farnan, O. and Wright, J.A.E. (2017) "FilteredWeb: A Framework for the Automated Search-Based Discovery of Blocked URLs", IEEE/IFIP TMA Conference 2017.
  • Wright, J.A.E. and Roosendaal, A. (2017) Will data protection eventually kill privacy?.
  • Farnan, O., Darer, A. and Wright, J. (2016) "Poisoning the well -exploring the great firewall's poisoned DNS responses", WPES 2016 - Proceedings of the 2016 ACM Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society, co-located with CCS 2016. 95-98.
  • O Hanlon, P., Wright, J., Brown, I. and de Souza, T. (2015) "KEMF: Key management for federated sensor networks", Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social-Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, LNICST. 153 17-24.
  • Pham, V., Wright, J.A.E. and Dogan, K. (2011) A Practical Complexity-Theoretic Analysis of Mix Systems. (ESORICS ’11) Proceedings of the 16th European Conference on Research in Computer Security. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. 6879 508-527.

Journal articles

  • Wright, J. (2016) Regional variation in Chinese internet filtering. 121-140.
  • Zevenbergen, B., Brown, I., Wright, J. and Erdos, D. (2013) Ethical Privacy Guidelines for Mobile Connectivity Measurements.

Reports

  • Nash, V.J., Adler, J.R., Horvath, M.A.H., Livingstone, S., Marston, C., Owen, G. and Wright, J. (2016) "Identifying the Routes by which Children View Pornography Online: Implications for Future Policy-makers Seeking to Limit Viewing" In: Report of the Expert Panel for the DCMS Consultation "Child Safety Online: Age Verification for Pornography".
  • Zevenbergen, B., Brown, I., Wright, J. and Erdos, D. (2013) Ethical privacy guidelines for mobile connectivity measurements. Oxford: Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford.
  • Sieber, U., Tropina, T., von zur Mühlen, N., Brown, I., Wright, J., Broadhurst, R. and Krüger, K. (2013) "Comprehensive Study on Cybercrime" In: United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Vienna.
  • Wright, J.A.E., Stepney, S., Clark, J. and Jacob, J. (2005) Formalizing Anonymity: A Review. University of York Technical Report YCS 389. University of York, Heslington, York. YO10 5DD. UK..

  • Subversive Technologies

    This course aims to provide students with an understanding of technologies that provide control over information flows and action on the internet, and those that resist or subvert that control.

  • Internet Technologies and Regulation

    Exploring the interplay between social and technological shaping of the Internet, and associated policy implications. It outlines the Internet's origins and technical architecture and its embeddedness in a long history of communication technologies.