Award for SECURED research paper on
de-anonymization risks

SECURED Research Recognized with Best Student Paper Award at IEEE CBMS 2025

We are proud to share that the paper “ECG De-anonymization: Real-world Risks and a Privacy-by-design Mitigation Strategy”, co-authored by Hamza Aguelal and Paolo Palmieri from SECURED project partner University College Cork, has won Best Student Paper (1st place) at the IEEE 38th International Symposium on Computer-Based Medical Systems (CBMS 2025).

This work highlights the real-world risks associated with re-identifying individuals from Electrocardiogram (ECG) data – an often-overlooked vector in health data privacy – and proposes a novel privacy-by-design mitigation strategy. The research contributes directly to SECURED’s mission of advancing secure processing and anonymization techniques in the context of health data.

The award-winning paper is now available on Cork Open Research Archive:
🔗 Access the paper

We extend our congratulations to lead author Hamza Aguelal and his supervisor Dr. Paolo Palmieri for this outstanding achievement.

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The recognition at CBMS underscores the importance of cutting-edge research in safeguarding sensitive health information, an area at the core of SECURED’s mission.