March 29, 2024

Archives for 2016

The Princeton Bitcoin textbook is now freely available

The first complete draft of the Princeton Bitcoin textbook is now freely available. We’re very happy with how the book turned out: it’s comprehensive, at over 300 pages, but has a conversational style that keeps it readable. If you’re looking to truly understand how Bitcoin works at a technical level and have a basic familiarity […]

Updating the Defend Trade Secrets Act?

Despite statements to the contrary by sponsors and supporters in April 2014, August 2015, and October 2015, backers of the Defend Trade Secrets Act (DTSA) now aver that “cyber espionage is not the primary focus” of the legislation. At last month’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, the DTSA was instead supported by two different primary reasons: […]

Who Will Secure the Internet of Things?

Over the past several months, CITP-affiliated Ph.D. student Sarthak Grover and fellow Roya Ensafi been investigating various security and privacy vulnerabilities of Internet of Things (IoT) devices in the home network, to get a better sense of the current state of smart devices that many consumers have begun to install in their homes. To explore this question, […]

The Web Privacy Problem is a Transparency Problem: Introducing the OpenWPM measurement tool

In a previous blog post I explored the success of our study, The Web Never Forgets, in having a positive impact on web privacy. To ensure a lasting impact, we’ve been doing monthly, automated 1-million-site measurement of tracking and privacy. Soon we’ll be releasing these datasets and our findings. But in this post I’d like […]

Do privacy studies help? A Retrospective look at Canvas Fingerprinting

It seems like every month we hear of some new online privacy violation in the news, on topics such as fingerprinting or web tracking. Many of these news stories highlight academic research. What we don’t see is whether these studies and the subsequent news stories have any impact on privacy. Our 2014 canvas fingerprinting measurement […]