November 24, 2024

Researchers Show Flaws in Airport Scanner

Today at the Usenix Security Symposium a group of researchers from UC San Diego and the University of Michigan will present a paper demonstrating flaws in a full-body scaning machine that was used at many U.S. airports. In this post I’ll summarize their findings and discuss the security and policy implications.

The hidden perils of cookie syncing

[Steven Englehardt is a first-year Ph.D. student in the computer security group at Princeton. In this post he talks about the implications of a recent study that we published in collaboration with researchers at KU Leuven, Belgium. — Arvind Narayanan] Online tracking is becoming more sophisticated and thus increasingly difficult to block. Modern browsers expose many surfaces that enable users […]

Why were CERT researchers attacking Tor?

Yesterday the Tor Project issued an advisory describing a large-scale identification attack on Tor hidden services. The attack started on January 30 and ended when Tor ejected the attackers on July 4. It appears that this attack was the subject of a Black Hat talk that was canceled abruptly. These attacks raise serious questions about […]

A Scanner Darkly: Protecting User Privacy from Perceptual Applications

“A Scanner Darkly”, a dystopian 1977 Philip K. Dick novel (adapted to a 2006 film), describes a society with pervasive audio and video surveillance. Our paper “A Scanner Darkly”, which appeared in last year’s IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland) and has just received the 2014 PET Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies, takes a closer look at […]

"Loopholes for Circumventing the Constitution", the NSA Statement, and Our Response

CBS News and a host of other outlets have covered my new paper with Sharon Goldberg, Loopholes for Circumventing the Constitution: Warrantless Bulk Surveillance on Americans by Collecting Network Traffic Abroad. We’ll present the paper on July 18 at HotPETS [slides, pdf], right after a keynote by Bill Binney (the NSA whistleblower), and at TPRC […]