October 7, 2024

Demystifying The Dark Web: Peeling Back the Layers of Tor’s Onion Services

by Philipp Winter, Annie Edmundson, Laura Roberts, Agnieskza Dutkowska-Żuk, Marshini Chetty, and Nick Feamster Want to find US military drone data leaks online? Frolick in a fraudster’s paradise for people’s personal information? Or crawl through the criminal underbelly of the Internet? These are the images that come to most when they think of the dark […]

Internet of Things in Context: Discovering Privacy Norms with Scalable Surveys

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 […]

Teaching the Craft, Ethics, and Politics of Field Experiments

How can we manage the politics and ethics of large-scale online behavioral research? When this question came up in April during a forum on Defending Democracy at Princeton, Ed Felten mentioned on stage that I was teaching a Princeton undergrad class on this very topic. No pressure! Ed was right about the need: people with […]

Against privacy defeatism: why browsers can still stop fingerprinting

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

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 […]