CNRS Senior Researcher (Directrice de Recherches)
Head of the Distributed Systems and Information Retrieval group (DRIM@LIRIS)
Laboratoire LIRIS (UMR 5205)

69621 Villeurbanne, FRANCE
Email: sonia (dot) ben-mokhtar (at) liris.cnrs.fr
Phone: +33 4 72 43 82 82
Short Bio
I have been a CNRS researcher at the LIRIS lab since October 2009. Since 2017, I am also the leader of the distributed systems and information retrieval group (DRIM). Before joining CNRS, I was a research associate at University College London (UCL) for two years, working with Licia Capra. I received my PhD in 2007 from University Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris 6), which I did under the supervision of Valérie Issarny and Nikolaos Georgantas in the former INRIA ARLES project-team (currently MiMove).
News
- Congrats to Vikas Jaiman for his work on scheduling multi-get requests in Key-Value stores that got the Best Paper Award @Dais2020 conference!
- Congrats to Mohamed Maouche, Besma Khalfoun, Simon Da Silva (Labri) and Zilong Zhao for their papers accepted at Middleware'19*2 and DSN'19 !
- We had a great time hosting the community in Lyon for the 38th edition of the international Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems (SRDS 2019)!

Research interests
- Reliable and Privacy-Preserving Distributed Systems
- Byzantine resilient systems
- Location privacy
- Private Web search
- Middleware for Mobile Environments
Current Projects
- (New!) ANR - DFG PRIMATE (2018 - 2021): Préservation de la vie privée dans un environnement d'exécution multi-enclaves fiables.
- (New!) ANR LabCom SIBIL-Lab (2018 - 2021): Sécurité, identité numérique et détection automatique de fraudes dans les réseaux sociaux B2B
- MobiCampus (Labex IMU): Mobility Analysis of students and staff in the 18 campuses of the city of Lyon. 2016-2019.
- In this project my focus will be on crowdsensing human mobility using smartphones and working on novel location privacy mechanisms.
- PRIVA'MOV (Labex IMU): Mobility & Privacy: from crowdsensing to data analysis. 2013-2016.
- In this project my focus is on location privacy.
- EEXCESS (EU FP7 IP): Enhancing Europe’s eXchange in Cultural Educational and Scientific Resource. 2012-2016.
- In this project my focus is on private Web search.
- ANR SocEDA: Plate-forme EDA sociale, largement distribuée pour l’informatique dans les nuages. 2010-2013.
Service
- Steering committee member of IEEE SRDS.
- Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions of Dependable and Secure Computing.
- General co-chair of IEEE SRDS 2019 in Lyon.
- Doctoral workshop co-chair at ACM Eurosys 2019.
- Shadow PC co-chair of ACM Eurosys 2018.
- Student forum co-chair of IEEE/IFIP DSN 2018.
- Track chair of the Distributed Systems and Algorithms track at Euro-Par 2018.
- Program committee co-chair of the ACM/IFIP/Usenix Middleware 2016 conference.
- Steering committee member of the ACM/IFIP/Usenix Middleware conference.
- Program committee co-chair of the workshop on Middleware for Next Generation Computing MW4NGC 2014, co-located with Middleware 2014.
- Publication chair for IEEE IC2E 2016.
- Publication chair for IEEE/Usenix ICAC 2015.
- Publication chair for ACM/IFIP/Usenix Middleware 2014.
- Co-organiser of the ASF/RSD Winter School on Distributed Systems and Networks
- Chair of the French chapter of the ACM SIGOPS (ASF) since 2018. Before that I served as vice-chair of ASF from 2012-2018.
- Head of the international relations of the LIRIS laboratory.
- Member of the board of the GDR Réseaux et Systèmes Distribués.
Program committees (a selection since 2014-)
- ACM Middleware 2021
- PoPETs/PETs 2021
- IEEE DSN 2021
- The Web Conference 2020
- ACM Eurosys 2020
- PoPETs/PETs 2020
- ACM/IFIP/Usenix Middleware 2019
- ACM Eurosys 2019
- ACM Eurosys 2018
- IEEE DSN 2018
- IEEE ICDCS 2018
- IEEE DSN 2017
- IEEE ICDCS 2017
- IEEE SRDS 2017
- ACM/IFIP/Usenix Middleware 2017
- DAIS 2017
- EURO-PAR 2017
- IEEE ICDCS 2016
- DAIS 2016
- IEEE SRDS 2016
- ICSOC 2015
- ACM/IFIP/Usenix Middleware 2015
- IEEE IPDPS 2015
- DAIS 2015
- IEEE ICAC 2015
- Compas 2015
- ACM/IFIP/Usenix Middleware 2014
- IEEE IPDPS2014
- IEEE SOSE 2014
- Compas 2014.
- ...
Software
- SFERA: A toolkit to experiment on re-identification attacks on mobility traces.
- HMC: A toolkit to test Location Privacy Protection Mechanism HMC (Heat-Map Confusion) and evaluate Privacy and Utility Metrics
- ACCIO: A Location Privacy Framework.
- Seine: A domain specific language for specifying and injecting selfish behaviors in distributed systems. Seine is used within the PeerSim simulator.
- RACOON++: A Semi-Automatic Framework for the Design and Simulation of Selfish-Resilient Cooperative Systems.
- Priva'Mov: A multi-sensor mobility dataset (GPS, GSM, WiFi, Accelerometer) collected in the city of Lyon.
PhD Students
- [Privacy] Besma Khalfoun with Sara Bouchenak
- Location privacy
Former PhD students
- [Privacy] Mohamed Maouche with Sara Bouchenak
- Mobility data analysis and protection
- [Mobile Systems] Hayam Mousa (in co-tutelle with university of Mennoufia, Egypt) with Lionel Brunie.
- [Dependability] Vikas Jaiman (@Grenoble) with Vivien Quéma
- [Privacy] Sophie Cerf (@Grenoble) with Sara Bouchenak, Nicolas Marchand and Bogdan Robu
- [Privacy] Vincent Primault. Currently post-doc at University College London (UCL, UK).
- [Dependability] Guido Lena Cota (in co-tutelle with the university of Milan) with Ernesto Damiani, Gabriel Gianini and Lionel Brunie.
- [Privacy] Albin Petit (in co-tutelle with the university of Passau) supervised with Michael Granitzer and Lionel Brunie. Currently post-doc at LIG Grenoble.
- [Dependability][Privacy] Jérémie Decouchant. Currently post-doc at university of Luxembourg.
- [Dependability] Amadou Diarra. Currently post-doc at LIG Grenoble.
- [Dependability] Pierre-Louis Aublin. Currently post-doc at Imperial College, London.
- [Dependability][Privacy] Gautier Berthou. Currently post-doc at SICS, Sweden.
- [Mobile Systems] Jingwei Miao. Currently working in a company in Beijing, China.
Selected Book Chapters / Journals
- [Privacy/Mobile Systems] The Long Road to Computational Location Privacy: ASurvey. Accepted for publication in the IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials (preprint).
- [Privacy/Mobile Systems]HMC: Robust Privacy Protection of Mobility Data Against Multiple Re-Identification Attacks. Accepted for publication in the ACM journal of Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (ACM IMWUT). Paper to be presented at Ubicomp'18.
- [Dependability] RACOON++: A Semi-Automatic Framework for the Selfishness-aware Design of Cooperative Systems. IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing. Volume: PP, Issue: 99. 2017.
- [Mobile Systems] Adaptive and context-aware service composition for IoT-based smart cities. Future Generation Computer Systems. 2017. Online access.
- [Privacy] SimAttack: private web search under fire. Journal of Internet Services and Applications 7(1): 2:1-2:17 (2016).
- [Mobile Systems] 4PR: Privacy preserving routing in mobile delay tolerant networks. To appear in Computer Networks, 2016.
- [Dependability] Trust Management and Reputation Systems in Mobile Participatory Sensing Applications: A Survey. Computer Networks, Volume 90, Pages 49–73, 2015.
- [Mobile Systems] Hybrid service matchmaking in ambient assisted living environments based on context-aware service modeling. Cluster Computing, Springer, 2015.
- [Mobile Systems] A Delay and Cost Balancing Protocol for Message Routing in Mobile Delay Tolerant Networks. Ad Hoc Networks, Elsevier, Volume 25, Part B, P430–443. 2015.
- [Mobile Systems] An investigation on the unwillingness of nodes to participate in mobile delay tolerant network routing. Elsevier International Journal of Information Management. 2013.
- [Mobile Systems] Fair content dissemination in participatory DTNs. Ad Hoc Networks, Elsevier, Volume 10(8), pp 1633-1645. 2012.
- [Mobile Systems] Service Discovery in Pervasive Computing Environments. MIT book "At your service". Book Chapter. 2009.
Selected Conferences
- (New!)[Privacy]MooD: MObility Data Privacy as Orphan Disease. Accepted for publication at 20th International Middleware Conference (Middleware 19).
- (New!)[Privacy]PrivaTube: Privacy-Preserving Edge-Assisted Video Streaming. Accepted for publication at 20th International Middleware Conference (Middleware 19).
- (New!)[Dependability]Robust Anomaly Detection on Unreliable Data. Accepted for publication at IEEE DSN 2019.
- [Privacy] EActors: Fast and flexible trusted computing using SGX. Accepted for publication in the 19th ACM/IFIP/USENIX International Middleware Conference (Middleware 2018).
- Héron: Taming Tail Latencies in Key Value Stores under Heterogeneous Workloads. Accepted for publication in the 37th IEEE International Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems (IEEE SRDS'18).
- [Privacy] CYCLOSA : Decentralizing Private Web Search Through SGX-Based Browser Extensions. Accepted for publication in the 38th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (IEEE ICDCS'18).
- [Privacy/Mobile Systems] ACCIO: How to Make Location Privacy Experimentation Open and Easy. Accepted for publication in the 38th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (IEEE ICDCS'18).
- [Privacy] X-Search: Revisiting Private Web Search using Intel SGX. In the 18th ACM/IFIP/Usenix International Middleware Conference 2017 (Middleware'17).
- [Privacy/Mobile Systems]PrivaSense: Privacy-Preserving and Reputation-Aware Mobile Participatory Sensing. Accepted for publication at 14th International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems: Computing, Networking and Services (Mobiquitous'17). 2017.
- [Privacy/Mobile Systems] AP-Attack: A novel Re-identification Attack On Mobility Datasets. Accepted for publication at 14th International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems: Computing, Networking and Services (Mobiquitous'17). 2017.
- [Privacy] Achieving Privacy and Utility Trade-off in Mobility Databases with PULP.
- Sophie Cerf, Vincent Primault, Antoine Boutet, Sonia Ben Mokhtar, Robert Birke, Lydia Y. Chen, Sara Bouchenak, Nicolas Marchand and Bogdan Robu. Accepted for publication at 36th IEEE Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems (IEEE SRDS'17). 2017.
- [Dependability] Analysing Selfishness Flooding with SEINE. G. Lena Cota, S. Ben Mokhtar, J. Lawall, G. Muller, G. Gianini, E. Damiani, L. Brunie. In proceedings of the 47th IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (IEEE DSN'17). 2017.
- [Privacy] Adaptive Location Privacy with ALP. In proceedings of the 35th IEEE Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems (IEEE SRDS'16). 2016.
- [Privacy/Dependability] PAG: Private and Accountable Gossip. In proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (IEEE ICDCS'16).
- [Dependability] G. Lena Cota, S. Ben Mokhtar, J. Lawall, G. Muller, G. Gianini, E. Damiani, L. Brunie. RACOON: A Framework for the Design of Accountable Selfish-Resilient Cooperative Systems. In proceedings of the 34th IEEE Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems (IEEE SRDS'15). 2015.
- [Privacy] Albin Petit, Thomas Cerqueus, Sonia Ben Mokhtar, Lionel Brunie & Harald Kosch. PEAS: Private, Efficient and Accurate Web Search. In proceedings of the 14th IEEE International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications (IEEE TrustCom'15). 2015.
- [Privacy] Vincent Primault, Sonia Ben Mokhtar, Cédric Lauradoux & Lionel Brunie. Time Distortion Anonymization for the Publication of Mobility Data with High Utility. In proceedings of the 14th IEEE International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications (IEEE TrustCom'15). 2015.
- [Dependability] A. Diarra, S. Ben Mokhtar, P.L. Aublin, V. Quéma. FullReview: Practical Accountability in Presence of Selfish Nodes. In proceedings of The 33rd IEEE Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems (IEEE SRDS'14). 2014. (Paper below)
- [Dependability] J. Decouchant, S. Ben Mokhtar, V. Quema. AcTinG: Accurate Freerider Tracking in Gossip. In proceedings of The 33rd IEEE Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems (IEEE SRDS'14). 2014. (Paper below)
- [Privacy] V. Primault, S. Ben Mokhtar, C. Lauradoux, L. Brunie. Differentially Private Location Privacy in Practice. In Mobile Security Technologies (MOST) co-located with S&P 2014. (Paper below)
- [Dependability] Pierre-Louis Aublin, Sonia Ben Mokhtar and Vivien Quéma. RBFT: Redundant Byzantine Fault Tolerance. In proceedings of the 33rd International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (IEEE ICDCS'13). 2013. (Paper below)
- [Dependability/Privacy] Sonia Ben Mokhtar, Gautier Berthou, Amadou Diarra, Vivien Quéma and Ali Shoker. RAC: a Freerider-resilient, Scalable, Anonymous Communication Protocol. In proceedings of the 33rd International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (IEEE ICDCS'13). 2013. (Paper below)
- [Dependability] Sonia Ben Mokhtar, Alessio Pace and Vivien Quéma. FireSpam: Spam Resilient Gossiping in the BAR Model. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems (IEEE SRDS'10). 2010.
- [Mobile Systems] Afra Meshhadi, Sonia Ben Mokhtar, Licia Capra. Habit: Leveraging Human Mobility and Social Network for Efficient Content Dissemination in MANETs. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on aWorld of Wireless, Mobile and Multimedia Networks (IEEE WoWMoM'09). 2009.
- [Mobile Systems] Sonia Ben Mokhtar, Anupam Kaul, Nikolaos Georgantas, Valérie Issarny. Efficient Semantic Service Discovery in Pervasive Computing Environments. In Proceedings of the International Middleware Conference(Middleware). 2006.