[{"content":"I am a Research Scientist at CSIRO\u0026rsquo;s Cybersecurity \u0026amp; Quantum Systems group, researching privacy-enhancing technologies, differential privacy, and applied cryptography. I completed my PhD at UNSW Sydney and CSIRO in 2025 on the privacy of location trajectories, recognised with a Best Paper Award at PST’24 and published at PETS, ACSAC, and AsiaCCS. I am a strong advocate for open science and welcome opportunities to collaborate and give talks.\n","date":"21 January 2024","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/","section":"","summary":"","title":"","type":"page"},{"content":" I am a Research Scientist in the Cybersecurity and Quantum Systems (CQS) group at CSIRO\u0026rsquo;s Data61. My research interests include privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs), differential privacy, generative models, and applied cryptography. Previously, I was a Postdoctoral Researcher in Cybersecurity at UNSW Sydney (ISPri research group) and GuardWare Australia, where my research focused on encrypting unstructured data in the defence supply chain.\nI completed my PhD at UNSW Sydney and CSIRO\u0026rsquo;s Data61 in 2025, supported by the competitive CSCRC and UIPA scholarships. My PhD focused on the privacy of location trajectories using differential privacy and generative models. This thesis identified shortcomings of existing privacy mechanisms, proposed a novel reconstruction attack, and explored synthetic data generation as a privacy-preserving solution. My research was recognised with the Best Paper Award at PST’24 and publications at venues such as PETS, ACSAC, and AsiaCCS.\nI am strongly committed to open science, and the code for all my publications is available on GitHub to ensure reproducibility and support future research. To ensure that my research leads to tangible impact, I am contributing to the Digital Futures Forum of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences \u0026amp; Engineering. Moreover, I supervised over 20 students on theses, capstone projects, and internships, with two projects leading to international conference submissions. I served on the student advisory board for the AGSE Industry PhD program, acted as system administrator for the Information Security and Privacy (ISPri) research group, and was recognised as one of Australia’s Top100 Future Leaders in 2025. In recognition of my contributions to community wellbeing, including mentoring and volunteering, I was awarded the Arc PGC Faculty of Engineering Research Candidate Award.\nI value opportunities to share my research with both the academic community and the public. I have delivered more than 15 oral and poster presentations, receiving the AGSE 3MT People’s Choice Award and the SecEdu Best Poster Award. These engagements help bridge the gap between research and practice, and I welcome further opportunities to collaborate and give talks.\nBefore my PhD, I earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees with distinction from RWTH Aachen, Germany. My master’s thesis on the privacy-preserving exchange of process parameters was published at ACSAC20 and received both the Vöcking Master Award and the FOLKS Best Master’s Thesis Award in 2020. During my studies, I was consistently ranked in the top 5% of students, featured on the dean’s list, and sponsored by the German Education Fund.\nOutside my academic pursuits, I am passionate about fitness and nutrition, with a focus on competitive CrossFit and endurance running, including marathons and half-marathons. I also enjoy salsa dancing, cooking, and travelling with my partner. You can find my personal blog (in German) at downunder.erikbuchholz.de.\nAwards \u0026amp; Scholarships # Emerging Leader of ATSE Digital Futures Forum: February 2026\nArc PGC Faculty of Engineering Research Candidate Award: October 2025\nGradConnection Top100 Future Leader Award: February 2025\nBest Paper Award: 21st Annual International Conference on Privacy, Security, and Trust (PST2024)\nEngineering Industry Engagement Grant: May 2024\nBest Poster Award: SecEdu Conference 2023\nAGSE 3 Minute Thesis Competition 2023: People\u0026rsquo;s Choice \u0026amp; 2nd Place Overall\nAGSE Industry PhD program: March 2023 – November 2024\nACSAC Student Conferenceship : 2022 – Valued at $1900 USD\nCyber Security Cooperative Research Centre (CSCRC) PhD Scholarship: Mai 2021 - Mai 2024\nUniversity International Postgraduate Award (UIPA) Scholarship: Mai 2021 - November 2024\nFOLKS Award for the Best Master’s Thesis: 2020\nVöcking Master Award: 2020 - Award for an outstanding master\u0026rsquo;s thesis in Computer Science\nACSAC Student Conferenceship: 2020 - Free attendance of ACSAC'20 conference\nFinal of eurobits e.V. Excellence Award: 2020\nDean\u0026rsquo;s List RWTH Aachen(4x) (Top 5% of CS students): 2013/14, 2014/15, 2017/18, and 2019/20\nGerman Education Fund (3x): 2015/16, 2017/18, and 2018/19\nDAAD Year Scholarship for a year abroad at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS): 2017\nFOLKS Best Seminar Award: 2016\nBest High School Graduate in Wolfsburg: 2013\nEducation # PhD at UNSW Sydney\nThesis Title: The Long Road to Trajectory Privacy: Differential Privacy and Generative Models\nSupervisors: Prof. Salil S. Kanhere and Dr. Surya Nepal\nCyber Security Cooperative Research Centre (CSCRC) Scholarship\nMaster of Science with Distinction in Computer Science at RWTH Aachen\nFinal Grade: 1.0 (German Grading System)\nMaster’s Thesis: Privacy-Preserving Exchange of Process Parameters\nApplied Course: Business Administration\nBachelor of Science with Distinction in Computer Science at RWTH Aachen\nFinal Grade: 1.1 (German Grading System)\nBachelor\u0026rsquo;s Thesis: A User-controlled Data Market for Privacy-preserving Data Analyses\nStudy Abroad at University of Technology Sydney for one year\nApplied Course: Physics\nGerman Abitur at Albert-Schweitzer-Gymnasium with overall degree 1.0\nFocus Subjects: Physics, Maths, Chemistry. (Academic) Service \u0026amp; Leadership # See: Academic Service Qualifications \u0026amp; Courses # HDR Employability Program: 2023\nIMNIS Engage Mentoring Program: 2023 - 2024\nLeadership Foundations Program by UNSW Sydney: 2022\nDeep Learning Specialisation by DeepLearning.AI: 2021\nPersonalized English Learning Enhancement Course at UNSW Sydney: 2021\nPrecision Nutrition Level 1 Nutrition Certification: 2019\nUTS BUiLD Leadership Program Graduate: 2017\nToastmasters Speechcraft Seminar: 2017\nLanguages # German: Native speaker\nEnglish: Expert User (IELTS – Overall Band 9.0 (Expert User) on 27/07/2025)\nSpanish: CEFR Level B2\nPersonal Interests # Fitness: competitive CrossFit, Marathon (3:52:54 in Sydney), (Sprint Triathlon 1:29:51 in Port Stephens) [STRAVA]\nNutrition: Precision Nutrition certified\nSalsa Dancing\nPhotography (@x20ckx)\nTravelling\nCurriculum Vitae # Download CV (PDF) Personal Blog # Downunder.erikbuchholz.de [GERMAN] ","date":"21 January 2024","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/about/","section":"","summary":"","title":"About","type":"page"},{"content":"I have participated in the supervision of the following students:\nThesis Students # 2025 | Johnny Qin (UNSW Sydney) | Honours Thesis: Exploring High-Fidelity, Privacy-Preserving Location Trajectory Models: Diffusion and Beyond 2023 | Jesse Merhi (UNSW Sydney) | Honours Thesis: Synthetic Trajectory Generation Through Convolutional Neural Networks Capstone Projects # 2026 | 6 Students @ UNSW Sydney | Becoming invisible: Measuring Encryption Performance 2025 | 5 students @ UNSW Sydney | Secure Data Governance in the Supply Chain – Group 3 2025 | 7 students @ UNSW Sydney | Secure Data Governance in the Supply Chain – Group 2 2025 | 6 students @ UNSW Sydney | Secure Data Governance in the Supply Chain – Group 1 2024 | 4 Students @ UNSW Sydney |Trajectory Recovery from Ash: In the Age of AI – Group 2 2024 | 6 Students @ UNSW Sydney | Trajectory Recovery from Ash: In the Age of AI – Group 1 Research Interns # 2026 | Albin James Maliakal | TBD 2026 | Avika Joshi | CondMIA – The Risk of Conditional Information 2025 | Nagaraj Pandiyan | Exploration of Membership Inference on Trajectory Datasets 2024 | Shyam Kaushik | Comparative analysis of the performance of RNN- and CNN-based generative models for the generation of synthetic location trajectories ","date":"19 January 2024","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/students/","section":"","summary":"","title":"Students","type":"page"},{"content":" General Service \u0026amp; Presentations # January 2024 – April 2026 | System Administrator | UNSW Sydney\nManagement of 5 GPU servers for the IoT Systems Research Group at UNSW Responsible for all administration tasks, including patching, user management, technical support, troubleshooting and others October 2025 – April 2026 | Website Administrator | ISPri Research Group @ UNSW\nEstablishment of the new ISPri Research Group Website based on Hugo Automation of publication updates to minimise manual effort \u0026amp; content management via GitHub Issues September – November 2025 | Web Chair of Privacy Summer School | UNSW Sydney\nImplemented \u0026amp; managed the website: https://privacy-summer-school-2025.github.io/ Handled communication with participants \u0026amp; applicants May 2024 – February 2025 | Student Advisory Board | AGSE Industry PhD Program\nProvide input into the direction of the program Develop, organise and lead events August 2023 | Panellist | AGSE Industry PhD\nParticipated as a panellist discussing industry involvement in a PhD program July 2023 – October 2024| HDR Peer Mentoring | UNSW Sydney\nMentoring of 11 first-year Higher Degree Research students (2nd Time) May 2023 | Presentation | PETS Workshop \u0026ldquo;Current Challenges and Emerging Technologies\u0026rdquo;\nPresented my research at the PETS workshop in Sydney as part of privacy awareness week 2023 | Bachelor Thesis Supervision | UNSW Sydney\nCo-Supervision of Synthetic Trajectory Generation through Convolutional Neural Networks June 2022 – May 2023 | HDR Peer Mentoring | UNSW Sydney\nMentoring of five first-year Higher Degree Research students 2022 | Student Workshop Committee | IFCYBER 2022\nOrganisation committee member for CYBER Thesis Competition (CTC) 2022 Reviews (See Orcid) # March 2026 | Two Paper Reviews for ACM CCS 2026 February 2026 | Two Paper Reviews for Pervasive and Mobile Computing (IEEE PMC) January 2026 | One Paper Review for T-IFS and one Paper Review for Pervasive and Mobile Computing (IEEE PMC) December 2025 | One Paper Review for ACISP 2026 September 2025 | Two Paper Reviews for INFOCOM 2026 August 2025 | One Paper Review for MSWiM 2025 August 2025 | One Paper Review for Ad Hoc Networks January 2025 | One Paper Review for T-IFS October 2024 | One Paper Review for TrustCom 2024 October 2024 | One Paper Review for ACM ASIA Conference on Computer and Communications Security (AsiaCCS) September 2024 | One Paper Review for IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM) May 2024 | One Paper Review for Pervasive and Mobile Computing (IEEE PMC) August 2023 | One Paper Review for IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (IEEE TDSC) May 2023 | Three Paper Reviews for CSCRC Symposium 2023 April 2023 | One Paper Review for IEEE Transactions on Services Computing (IEEE TSC) February 2023 | One Paper Review for IEEE WoWMoM May 2022 | Three Paper Reviews for CSCRC Symposium 2022 ","date":"17 March 2022","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/academic-service/","section":"","summary":"","title":"Academic Service","type":"page"},{"content":"2022-2025 | Tutor | UNSW Sydney\nSubject: COMP3331/93331 – Computer Networks and Applications Preparation of teaching materials In-Person Teaching of labs \u0026amp; tutorials Marking of assignments MyExperience: Higher student satisfaction than Uni, Faculty, and School average. 2018 | Tutor | RWTH Aachen\nSubject: Operating Systems and System Software 2017 | Tutor | UTS Housing\nSubject: \u0026ldquo;Introduction to Programming in Python\u0026rdquo; Independent teaching Establishment of a new course for students of all faculties including creation of materials, preparation, and presentation 2016/17 | Tutor | RWTH Aachen\nSubject: Introduction to Management Science (IT for business students) 2016 | Tutor | RWTH Aachen\nSubject: Operating Systems and System Software 2015/16 | Tutor | RWTH Aachen\nSubject: Computability and Complexity 2015 | Tutor | RWTH Aachen\nSubject: Operating Systems and System Software ","date":"17 September 2020","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/teaching/","section":"","summary":"","title":"Teaching","type":"page"},{"content":" 2025 # Erik Buchholz, Natasha Fernandes, David D. Nguyen, Alsharif Abuadbba, Shuo Wang, Surya Nepal, and Salil S. Kanhere. What is the Cost of Differential Privacy for Deep Learning-Based Trajectory Generation?. arXiv – currently under review, June 2025. [DOI] [PDF] [CODE] 2024 # Nicholas D’Silva, Toran Shahi, Øyvind Timian Dokk Husveg, Adith Sanjeeve, Erik Buchholz, and Salil S. Kanhere. Demystifying Trajectory Recovery from Ash: An Open-Source Evaluation and Enhancement. In 2024 17th International Conference on Security of Information and Networks (SIN), volume 17, page 8, Sydney, NSW, Australia, December 2024. IEEE.\n[DOI] [PDF] [CODE] Jesse Merhi, Erik Buchholz, and Salil S. Kanhere. Synthetic Trajectory Generation through Convolutional Neural Networks. In 2024 21st Annual International Conference on Privacy, Security and Trust (PST), volume 21, pages 1-12, Sydney, NSW, Australia, August 2024. IEEE.\n[DOI] [PDF] [CODE] Erik Buchholz, Alsharif Abuadbba, Shuo Wang, Surya Nepal, and Salil S. Kanhere. SoK: Can Trajectory Generation Combine Privacy and Utility?. Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies, 2024(3):75-93, July 2024.\n[DOI] [PDF] [CODE] 2022 # Erik Buchholz, Alsharif Abuadbba, Shuo Wang, Surya Nepal, and Salil S. Kanhere. Reconstruction Attack on Differential Private Trajectory Protection Mechanisms. In Proceedings of the 38th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, pages 279-292, New York, NY, USA, December 2022. Association for Computing Machinery. [DOI] [PDF] [CODE] 2021 # Jan Pennekamp, Erik Buchholz, Markus Dahlmanns, Ike Kunze, Stefan Braun, Eric Wagner, Matthias Brockmann, Klaus Wehrle, and Martin Henze. Collaboration is not Evil: A Systematic Look at Security Research for Industrial Use. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Learning from Authoritative Security Experiment Results (LASER ’20), 12 2021. [DOI] [PDF] 2020 # Jan Pennekamp, Erik Buchholz, Yannik Lockner, Markus Dahlmanns, Tiandong Xi, Marcel Fey, Christian Brecher, Christian Hopmann, and Klaus Wehrle. Privacy-Preserving Production Process Parameter Exchange. In Proceedings of the 36th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC ’20), 12 2020.\n[DOI] [PDF] [CODE] Roman Matzutt, Jan Pennekamp, Erik Buchholz, and Klaus Wehrle. Utilizing Public Blockchains for the Sybil-Resistant Bootstrapping of Distributed Anonymity Services. In Proceedings of the 15th ACM ASIA Conference on Computer and Communications Security (ASIACCS ’20), 10 2020.\n[DOI] [PDF] [CODE] University Papers # Master Thesis: Privacy-Preserving Exchange of Process Parameters\nAdvised by Jan Pennekamp (COMSYS, RWTH Aachen University) and Yannik Lockner (IKV at RWTH Aachen University)\nExamined by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Klaus Wehrle (COMSYS, RWTH Aachen University) and Prof. Dr.-Ing. Christian Hopmann (IKV at RWTH Aachen University)\nMaster Seminar: App Fingerprinting (ITSEC, RWTH Aachen University)\nBachelor Thesis: A User-controlled Data Market for Privacy-preserving Data Analyses\nAdvised by Roman Matzutt and Jan Henrik Ziegeldorf (both COMSYS, RWTH Aachen University)\nExamined by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Klaus Wehrle (COMSYS, RWTH Aachen University) and Prof. Dr. Bernhard Rumpe (SE, RWTH Aachen University)\nBachelor Seminar: Bloom Cookies - FOLKS Best Paper Award (COMSYS, RWTH Aachen University)\n","date":"24 February 2020","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/publications/","section":"","summary":"","title":"Publications","type":"page"},{"content":"","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/authors/","section":"Authors","summary":"","title":"Authors","type":"authors"},{"content":"","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/categories/","section":"Categories","summary":"","title":"Categories","type":"categories"},{"content":"","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/series/","section":"Series","summary":"","title":"Series","type":"series"},{"content":"","externalUrl":null,"permalink":"/tags/","section":"Tags","summary":"","title":"Tags","type":"tags"}]