Workshop on Innovation in Metadata Privacy: Analysis and Construction Techniques (IMPACT) 2025

While metadata can often reveal even more information about one’s identity and behaviour than data itself, ensuring metadata privacy is one of the most challenging aspects of Privacy Enhancing Technologies.

In the last decades, various designs of Anonymous Communication Networks, Private Information Retrieval (PIR), Oblivious RAM (ORAM) as well as Anonymous Communication protocols based on techniques from PIR have been proposed, however none have achieved a large-scale adoption comparable to other Privacy Enhancing Technologies such as end-to-end encrypted messaging systems like Signal or WhatsApp.

Challenges in metadata privacy range from scalability, threat modelling, devices such as IoTs having unique traffic patterns and the limited research interconnecting the different tools and techniques to achieve metadata privacy.

The IMPACT (Innovation in Metadata Privacy: Analysis and Construction Techniques) workshop seeks submissions from academia, industry, and public sector presenting novel research on all theoretical and practical aspects of metadata privacy (such as Mixnets, Anonymous Communications Networks, PIR, ORAM, etc). This workshop encourages submissions on new techniques, designs, schemes and analysis that solve current challenges and advance the field.