PEPR '25: 2025 USENIX Conference on Privacy Engineering Practice and Respect

Cat Easdon, Dynatrace Research; Patrick Berchtold, Dynatrace


Observability platforms provide development and operations teams with insights into their distributed systems, typically combining logs, metrics, and traces with additional telemetry for use cases such as runtime security monitoring and understanding user behavior. While this data is tremendously useful for troubleshooting and product development, it also poses privacy challenges. In this session, we'll consider these challenges through an offensive privacy lens, presenting our research conducting reconstruction attacks against aggregated user session data. We'll explore how offensive privacy research can be used to support the business case for a new product privacy feature, discuss the unique aspects of privacy threat modeling in a business-to-business (B2B) setting, and consider runtime mitigations to halt reconstruction attacks earlier in the 'privacy kill chain'.


https://www.usenix.org/conference/pepr25/presentation/easdon