Emiliano De Cristofaro is an Italian computer scientist and Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Riverside. His research focuses on security and privacy-enhancing technologies, trustworthy machine learning, and the measurement of online harms. In 2024 he was named a Distinguished Member of the Association for Computing Machinery.
Education De Cristofaro received a five-year BSc Honors degree (summa cum laude) in computer science from the University of Salerno, Italy, in 2005. 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.
Career Before joining academia, De Cristofaro was a member of the research staff at PARC (a Xerox company) from 2011 to 2013. 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. 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. Between 2019 and 2022, he was a member of the Technology Advisory Panel of the UK Information Commissioner's Office. He has also been a Faculty Fellow at The Alan Turing Institute, the UK's national institute for data science and artificial intelligence,
In 2023, he moved to the University of California, Riverside as Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering.. In 2017, he co-founded the iDRAMA Lab, an international research collective studying online communities and information weaponization.
Research De Cristofaro's research spans applied cryptography, privacy-enhancing technologies, trustworthy machine learning, and the empirical study of online harms. 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.
His earlier work focused on private set intersection and other cryptographic protocols for privacy-preserving computation, including techniques for securely testing human genomes. 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". 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.
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. 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.
De Cristofaro and collaborators have also studied state-sponsored troll accounts on Twitter, the QAnon conspiracy theory on Reddit and Voat, the Parler social network in the period around the January 6 Capitol attack, the effects of platform migration after the banning of the subreddit r/The_Donald, and the toxicity of the manosphere. His data-driven research has also addressed the automated detection of cyberbullying on social media, the operation of fake-engagement "like farms", and the measurement of internet censorship.
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".
His co-authored papers have received distinguished paper or best paper awards at venues including the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (2025), the Internet Measurement Conference (2018), the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (2018), and the ACM Web Science Conference (2023), as well as an impact recognition award at the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (2021).
His privacy research has also received the 2017 Data Protection by Design Award from the Catalan Data Protection Authority, and was runner-up for the INRIA–CNIL Privacy Protection Award in 2019.
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.
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