by Noah Apthorpe, Yan Shvartzshnaider, Arunesh Mathur, Nick Feamster Privacy concerns surrounding disruptive technologies such as the Internet of Things (and, in particular, connected smart home devices) have been prevalent in public discourse, with privacy violations from these devices occurring frequently. As these new technologies challenge existing societal norms, determining the bounds of “acceptable” information handling […]
Against privacy defeatism: why browsers can still stop fingerprinting
June 29, 2018 by
In this post I’ll discuss how a landmark piece of privacy research was widely misinterpreted, how this misinterpretation deterred the development of privacy technologies rather than spurring it, how a recent paper set the record straight, and what we can learn from all this. The research in question is about browser fingerprinting. Because of differences […]
Fast Web-based Attacks to Discover and Control IoT Devices
June 21, 2018 by
By Gunes Acar, Danny Y. Huang, Frank Li, Arvind Narayanan, and Nick Feamster Two web-based attacks against IoT devices made the rounds this week. Researchers Craig Young and Brannon Dorsey showed that a well known attack technique called “DNS rebinding” can be used to control your smart thermostat, detect your home address or extract unique […]
Exfiltrating data from the browser using battery discharge information
June 20, 2018 by
Modern batteries are powerful – indeed they are smart, and have a privileged position enabling them to sense device utilization patterns. A recent research paper has identified a potential threat: researchers (from Technion, University of Texas Austin, Hebrew University) devise a scenario where malicious batteries are supplied to user devices (e.g. via compromised supply chains): An […]
No boundaries for Facebook data: third-party trackers abuse Facebook Login
April 18, 2018 by
by Steven Englehardt [0], Gunes Acar, and Arvind Narayanan So far in the No boundaries series, we’ve uncovered how web trackers exfiltrate identifying information from web pages, browser password managers, and form inputs. Today we report yet another type of surreptitious data collection by third-party scripts that we discovered: the exfiltration of personal identifiers from […]
