Jonathan Mayer and I have a new piece in Slate about how the NSA piggybacks on the web tracking activities of advertisers and other services. Essentially, the trackers tag computers and smartphones with unique tracking IDs that are attached to web requests, and the NSA uses those tracking IDs to follow users. I wrote last […]
How to stop spies from piggybacking on commercial Web tracking
December 10, 2013 by
Tonight the Washington Post published a story about the NSA’s eavesdropping on the unique tracking cookies used by advertisers and analytics companies to identify their users. By capturing these unique identifiers the NSA was able to re-identify users whom it had seen earlier. In short, the NSA could piggyback on commercial tracking to track users […]
Princeton CS research on secure communications
December 6, 2013 by
Continuing our series on security research here at Princeton Computer Science, I’d like to talk about how new information about government surveillance is driving research on how to secure communications. For a long time, users and companies have been slow to adopt secure, encrypted communication technologies. The new surveillance environment changes that, with companies racing […]
Bitcoin Research in Princeton CS
November 29, 2013 by
Continuing our post series on ongoing research in computer security and privacy here at Princeton, today I’d like to survey some of our research on Bitcoin. Bitcoin is hot right now because of the recent run-up in its value. At the same time, Bitcoin is a fascinating example of how technology, economics, and social interactions […]
Game Theory and Bitcoin
November 11, 2013 by
In light of the back-and-forth about the recent Eyal and Sirer (“ES”) paper about Bitcoin mining, I want to take a step back and talk about what a careful analysis of Bitcoin mining dynamics would look like. (Here are some previous posts if you need backstory: 1 2 3 4 5.) The key to a […]
