Her main research interests are in data protection, security, and privacy. She has participated in several projects involving different aspects of information protection. On these topics she has published 280 papers appeared in journals, conference proceedings, and books. She is co-author of the book "Database Security," Addison-Wesley, 1995.
She is the chair of the IEEE Systems Council Technical Committee on Security and Privacy in Complex Information Systems (TCSPCIS), of the ERCIM Security and Trust Management Working Group (STM), and of the ACM Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society (WPES). She is the Coordinator of the Working Group on Security of the Italian Association for Information Processing (AICA), the Italian representative in the IFIP (International Federation for Information Processing) Technical Committee 11 (TC-11) on "Security and Privacy". She is a member of the Steering Committee of: European Symposium on Research in Computer Security (ESORICS), IEEE Conference on Communications and Network Security (CNS), IEEE Conference on Blockchain, Italian Conference on CyberSecurity, International Conference on Information Systems Security (ICISS), and International Conference on Information and Communications Security (ICICS). She has been named ACM Distinguished Scientist (2009) and IEEE Fellow (2012). She has received the ESORICS Oustdanding Research award (2018), the IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award (2016), the IFIP TC11 Kristian Beckman Award (2008), and the IFIP WG 11.3 Outstanding Research Contributions Award (2012).