[This is a guest post by Vitaly Shmatikov, professor at Cornell Tech and once upon a time my adviser at the University of Texas at Austin. — Arvind Narayanan.] TL;DR: short URLs produced by bit.ly, goo.gl, and similar services are so short that they can be scanned by brute force. Our scan discovered a large […]
Why Making Johnny's Key Management Transparent is So Challenging
March 31, 2016 by
In light of the ongoing debate about the importance of using end-to-end encryption to protect our data and communications, several tech companies have announced plans to increase the encryption in their services. However, this isn’t a new pledge: since 2014, Google and Yahoo have been working on a browser plugin to facilitate sending encrypted emails […]
Internet Voting, Utah GOP Primary Election
March 22, 2016 by
Utah’s Republican presidential primary was conducted today by Internet. If you have your voter-registration PIN, or even if you don’t, visit https://ivotingcenter.gop and you will learn something about Internet voting!
An Unprecedented Look into Utilization at Internet Interconnection Points
March 11, 2016 by
Measuring the performance of broadband networks is an important area of research, and efforts to characterize the performance of these networks continues to evolve. Measurement efforts to date have largely relied on inhome devices and are primarily designed to characterize access network performance. Yet, a user’s experience also relies on factors that lie upstream of ISP access networks, which […]
Apple, FBI, and Software Transparency
March 10, 2016 by
The Apple versus FBI showdown has quickly become a crucial flashpoint of the “new Crypto War.” On February 16 the FBI invoked the All Writs Act of 1789, a catch-all authority for assistance of law enforcement, demanding that Apple create a custom version of its iOS to help the FBI decrypt an iPhone used by one of the San […]
