Dr.-Ing. Istemi Ekin Akkus
Distinguished Member of Technical Staff at Nokia Bell Labs
I am a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff (DMTS) at Nokia Bell Labs in Stuttgart, Germany. My research interests lie in the intersection of computer networks and distributed systems. Currently, I am working on edge/cloud computing, confidential computing and decentralization.
Previously, I was a Ph.D. student at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in Germany. My advisor was Paul Francis. During my Ph.D., I had a research visit to the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) at Berkeley as well as an internship at Microsoft Research India in Bangalore.
Current & Past projects
- CACTEE aims to provide third-party verifiable certificates about properties of various confidential assets, including datasets, ML models and software. [code].
- KNIX is an open-source high-performance serverless computing platform with process-based lightweight function execution and container-based application isolation. I have been one of the main architects and developers. [code].
- Priv3+ is a (now defunct) Firefox [code] and Chrome [code] addon that prevents third party tracking via cookies, but enables social networking features on websites without requiring a blacklist. Priv3+ essentially emulated a fourth cookie policy that accepted third party cookies, but did not send them unless and until the user interacted with the third-party content. It was developed during my visit to the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) at Berkeley in 2014.
- Privacy-preserving digital assistants: During my internship Microsoft Research India, I worked with Saikat Guha on a personal and privacy-preserving (i.e., not talking with the cloud) digital assistant/recommendation system.
- Web privacy: During my Ph.D., I worked on various web privacy issues, mostly focusing preventing third-party tracking but still enabling functionality (e.g., obtaining web analytics in a non-tracking way, enabling social networking functionality without tracking).
Publications
Refereed publications
- CACTEE: Confidential Asset Certification using Trusted Execution Environments. Istemi Ekin Akkus, Ivica Rimac.
- Model Hijacking Attack in Federated Learning. Zheng Li, Siyuan Wu, Ruichuan Chen, Paarijaat Aditya, Istemi Ekin Akkus, Manohar Vanga, Min Zhang, Hao Li, Yang Zhang.
- Defeating Cerberus: Privacy-Leakage Mitigation in Vision Language Models. Boyang Zhang, Istemi Ekin Akkus, Ruichuan Chen, Alice Dethise, Klaus Satzke, Ivica Rimac, Yang Zhang.
- Enabling scalable and adaptive machine learning training via serverless computing on public cloud. Ahsan Ali, Xiaolong Ma, Syed Zawad, Paarijaat Aditya, Istemi Ekin Akkus, Ruichuan Chen, Lei Yang, Feng Yan.
- duet: Combining a Trustworthy Controller with a Confidential Computing Environment. Istemi Ekin Akkus, Ivica Rimac.
- PraaS: Verifiable Proofs of Property as-a-Service with Intel SGX. Istemi Ekin Akkus, Ivica Rimac, Ruichuan Chen.
- Citadel: Protecting Data Privacy and Model Confidentiality for Collaborative Learning. Chengliang Zhang, Junzhe Xia, Baichen Yang, Huancheng Puyang, Wei Wang, Ruichuan Chen, Istemi Ekin Akkus, Paarijaat Aditya, Feng Yan.
- Lessons Learned from Migrating Complex Stateful Applications onto Serverless Platforms. Zewen Jin, Yiming Zhu, Jiaan Zhu, Dongbo Yu, Cheng Li, Ruichuan Chen, Istemi Ekin Akkus, Yinlong Xu.
- Efficient GPU Sharing for Serverless Workflows. Klaus Satzke, Istemi Ekin Akkus, Ruichuan Chen, Ivica Rimac, Manuel Stein, Andre Beck, Paarijaat Aditya, Manohar Vanga, Volker Hilt.
- Will Serverless Computing Revolutionize NFV?. (invited paper) Paarijaat Aditya, Istemi Ekin Akkus, Andre Beck, Ruichuan Chen, Volker Hilt, Ivica Rimac, Klaus Satzke, Manuel Stein.
- ApproxJoin: Distributed Approximate Joins. Do Le Quoc, Istemi Ekin Akkus, Pramod Bhatotia, Spyros Blanas, Ruichuan Chen, Christof Fetzer, Thorsten Strufe.
- SAND: Towards High-Performance Serverless Computing. Istemi Ekin Akkus, Ruichuan Chen, Ivica Rimac, Manuel Stein, Klaus Satzke, Andre Beck, Paarijaat Aditya, Volker Hilt.
- Towards Reliable Application Deployment in the Cloud. Ruichuan Chen, Istemi Ekin Akkus, Bimal Viswanath, Ivica Rimac, Volker Hilt.
- Sieve: Actionable Insights from Monitored Metrics in Distributed Systems. Joerg Thalheim, Antonio Rodrigues, Istemi Ekin Akkus, Pramod Bhatotia, Ruichuan Chen, Bimal Viswanath, Lei Jiao, Christof Fetzer.
- The Case for a General and Interaction-based Third-party Cookie Policy. Istemi Ekin Akkus, Nicholas Weaver.
- SplitX: High-Performance Private Analytics. Ruichuan Chen, Istemi Ekin Akkus, Paul Francis.
- Non-tracking Web Analytics. Istemi Ekin Akkus, Ruichuan Chen, Michaela Hardt, Paul Francis, Johannes Gehrke.
- Large-scale Incremental Data Processing with Change Propagation. Pramod Bhatotia, Alexander Wieder, Istemi Ekin Akkus, Rodrigo Rodrigues, Umut A. Acar.
- Peer-to-peer Multipoint Video Conferencing with Layered Video. Istemi Ekin Akkus, Oznur Ozkasap, M. Reha Civanlar.
- Data Recovery for Web Applications. Istemi Ekin Akkus, Ashvin Goel.
- Multi-objective Optimization for Peer-to-Peer Multipoint Video Conferencing Using Layered Video. Istemi Ekin Akkus, Oznur Ozkasap, M. Reha Civanlar.
- Peer-to-peer Multipoint Video Conferencing Using Layered Video. Istemi Ekin Akkus, M. Reha Civanlar, Oznur Ozkasap.
- Secure Transmission of Video on an End System Multicast using Public Key Cryptography. Istemi Ekin Akkus, Oznur Ozkasap, M. Reha Civanlar.
Proceedings of the IEEE Workshop on System Software for Trusted Execution (SysTEX), SysTEX 2026, Edinburgh, UK, April 2026. [pdf] [code]
IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, February 2026. [online]
Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL2026). [pdf] [code]
Elsevier Journal on Performance Evaluation, Volume 167, 2025. [pdf] [online]
[Best Paper with Artifacts Award]
Proceedings of the IEEE Workshop on System Software for Trusted Execution (SysTEX), SysTEX 2024, Vienna, Austria, July 2024. [pdf] [code]
Proceedings of the IEEE Workshop on System Software for Trusted Execution (SysTEX), SysTEX 2024, Vienna, Austria, July 2024. [pdf] [code]
Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing, ACM SoCC2021, Seattle, WA, USA and Virtual, November 2021. [pdf] [code]
Proceedings of the ACM SIGOPS Asia-Pacific Workshop on Systems (APSys), APSys 2021, Hong Kong, China, August 2021. [pdf]
Proceedings of the ACM Workshop on High Performance Serverless Computing, ACM HiPS2021, Stockholm, Sweden, June 2021. [pdf] [code]
Proceedings of the IEEE, doi: 10.1109/JPROC.2019.2898101, 2019. [pdf]
Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing, ACM SoCC2018, Carlsbad, CA, USA, October 2018. [pdf] [the morning paper] [code]
Proceedings of the USENIX Annual Technical Conference, USENIX ATC2018, Boston, MA, USA, Jul 2018. [pdf] [code]
Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Emerging Networking Experiments and Technologies, CoNEXT2017, Seoul/Incheon, South Korea, Dec 2017. [pdf]
Proceedings of the ACM/IFIP/USENIX Middleware 2017, Middleware2017, Las Vegas, NV, USA, Dec 2017. [pdf] [code]
Proceedings of the IEEE Workshop on Web 2.0 Security & Privacy, W2SP2015, San Jose, CA, USA, May 2015. [pdf] [code (Firefox)] [code (Chrome)]
Proceedings of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication, SIGCOMM2013, Hong Kong, China, August 2013. [pdf] [code]
Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, CCS2012, Raleigh, NC, USA, October 2012. [pdf]
3rd USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Cloud Computing, HotCloud'11, Portland, OR, USA, June 2011. [pdf]
Journal of Network and Computer Applications, Volume 34, Issue 1, January 2011, pp. 137-150. (Extended version of ICIP2006 and PV2007 papers) [pdf]
Proceedings of the 40th IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks, DSN2010, Chicago, IL, USA, June 2010. [pdf]
Proceedings of the 16th International Packet Video Workshop, PV2007, Lausanne, Switzerland, November 2007. [pdf]
Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Image Processing, ICIP2006, Atlanta, GA, USA, October 2006. [pdf]
International Workshop on Multimedia, Representation and Security, MRCS2006, Istanbul, Turkey, Sep 2006.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 4105, pp. 603-610, Springer-Verlag Heidelberg. [pdf]
Technical Reports
- Cybercasing 2.0: You Get What You Pay For. Jaeyoung Choi, Istemi Ekin Akkus, Serge Egelman, Gerald Friedland, Robin Sommer, Michael Carl Tschantz, Nicholas Weaver.
- Formal Model and Verification of Privacy-preserving String Discovery for Mobile and Web Analytics. Istemi Ekin Akkus.
- String Discovery for Private Analytics. Istemi Ekin Akkus, Ruichuan Chen, Paul Francis.
arXiv preprint arXiv:1811.06584, November 2018. [pdf, arXiv]
Max Planck Institute for Software Systems Technical Report MPI-SWS-2014-006, September 2014. [pdf]
Max Planck Institute for Software Systems Technical Report MPI-SWS-2013-006, November 2013. [pdf]
Other
- Towards A Non-tracking Web. Istemi Ekin Akkus.
- Data Recovery for Web Applications. Istemi Ekin Akkus.
- Peer-to-peer Multipoint Video Conferencing Using Layered Video. Istemi Ekin Akkus.
Ph.D. thesis, Technical University of Kaiserslautern - Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, Mar 2016. [pdf]
Master of Applied Science thesis, University of Toronto, Toronto ON, September 2009. [pdf]
Master of Science thesis, Koc University, Istanbul, Turkey, August 2007. [pdf]
Service
Program Committee- 2027: EuroSys'27
- 2026: SysTeX26, PAISE26
- 2025: SysTeX25, PAISE25, ICDCS 2025 (external)
- 2024: PAISE24
- 2023: PAISE23, IEEE EDGE 2023
- 2022: PAISE22, HiPS2022
- 2021: PAISE21, HiPS2021
- 2020: HotEdge20, SEC 2020
- 2019: HotEdge19, Middleware19 (external)
Education
Ph.D., Computer Science
Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, Kaiserslautern and Saarbruecken, Germany
Sep 2010 - Mar 2016
Dissertation title: Towards A Non-tracking Web
Advisor: Professor Paul Francis
Master of Applied Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of Toronto, Toronto, ON Canada
Sep 2007 - Sep 2009
Thesis title: Data Recovery for Web Applications
Advisor: Professor Ashvin Goel
Master of Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Koc University, Istanbul, Turkey
Sep 2005 - Aug 2007
Thesis title: Peer-to-peer Multipoint Video Conferencing Using Layered Video
Advisors: Professor M. Reha Civanlar, Professor Oznur Ozkasap
Bachelor of Science, Mechanical Engineering and Computer Engineering, Double Major
Koc University, Istanbul, Turkey
Sep 2000 - June 2005
Last modification April 8, 2026, 16:43 (CEST).
