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The Western Information Security and Privacy Research Laboratory

Whisper Lab is a cyber security research group in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Western University, Canada headed by Aleksander Essex, assistant professor of software engineering. We're engaged in a range of research topics including:


Applied Cryptography

Homomorphic public-key cryptosystems, and other primitives.

Web Security

Network systems and protocol security (TLS, SSH, WPA) including configuration and parameterization.

Secure Multi-party Computation

Protocol designs and analysis for applications in trustworthy electronic voting, secure health informatics, geospacial analysis, and more.

Privacy and Anonymity

Passwords, fingerprinting, data storage and more.

Recent Articles

Online Voting Web Proxying Comes to Canada

September 24, 2019

Elections NWT voting site secured by Cloudflare certificate
Journey of online ballot cast in Northwest Territories election.

Did you know a foreign-owned cloud provider has access to NWT’s online votes on...

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10 Reasons You Need TLS/HTTPS on Your Website

September 27, 2018

Chrome not-secure warning on Elections Canada website
New Chrome “Not Secure” warning for insecure HTTP connections

Update March 25, 2019: CBC news has written a story about this issue.

Update March...

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Ontario Elections and the Problem with Online Voting

April 04, 2018

The question of online voting in Ontario municipalities is heating up as we approach the election in October. I did an interview for CBC News over the weekend about the many fundamental challenges to online voting, including why it’s...

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Interview on CBC's The Current

April 02, 2018

I did an interview last week on CBC’s Radio One’s The Current (starting at the 6:00 mark) about the Atlanta ransomware attack, and what it means for Canada’s municipalities and their plans for online voting this October.

In...

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