Research and expert commentary on digital technologies in public life
The New York Times, in an editorial today entitled “Arms Control for a Cyberage“, writes,
The problem is that unlike conventional weapons, with cyberweapons “there’s no clear line between offense and defense,” as President Obama noted this month in an interview with Re/code, a technology news publication. Defense in cyberwarfare consists of pre-emptively locating the enemy’s weakness, which means getting into its networks.
In a recent post, I talked about our paper showing how to identify anonymous programmers from their coding styles. We used a combination of lexical features (e.g., variable name choices), layout features (e.g., spacing), and syntactic features (i.e., grammatical structure of source code) to represent programmers’ coding styles. The previous post focused on the overall results and techniques we used. Today I’ll talk about applications and explain how source code authorship attribution can be used in software forensics, plagiarism detection, copyright or copyleft investigations, and other domains.
The discovery last week that Lenovo laptops had been shipping with preinstalled adware that left users wide open to security exploitation triggered a lot of righteous anger in the tech community. David Auerbach at Slate wrote that Lenovo had “betrayed its customers and sold out their security”. Whenever a big company does something so monumentally foolish, it’s worth stepping back and asking how this could have happened.
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