Over the past several months, CITP-affiliated Ph.D. student Sarthak Grover and fellow Roya Ensafi been investigating various security and privacy vulnerabilities of Internet of Things (IoT) devices in the home network, to get a better sense of the current state of smart devices that many consumers have begun to install in their homes. To explore this question, […]
The Web Privacy Problem is a Transparency Problem: Introducing the OpenWPM measurement tool
January 14, 2016 by
In a previous blog post I explored the success of our study, The Web Never Forgets, in having a positive impact on web privacy. To ensure a lasting impact, we’ve been doing monthly, automated 1-million-site measurement of tracking and privacy. Soon we’ll be releasing these datasets and our findings. But in this post I’d like […]
Do privacy studies help? A Retrospective look at Canvas Fingerprinting
January 12, 2016 by
It seems like every month we hear of some new online privacy violation in the news, on topics such as fingerprinting or web tracking. Many of these news stories highlight academic research. What we don’t see is whether these studies and the subsequent news stories have any impact on privacy. Our 2014 canvas fingerprinting measurement […]
How Will Consumers Use Faster Internet Speeds?
December 29, 2015 by
This week saw an exciting announcement about the experimental deployment of DOCSIS 3.1 in limited markets in the United States, including Philadelphia, Atlanta, and parts of northern California, which will bring gigabit-per-second Internet speeds to many homes over the existing cable infrastructure. The potential for gigabit speeds over the existing cable networks bring hope that more consumers […]
When coding style survives compilation: De-anonymizing programmers from executable binaries
December 29, 2015 by
In a recent paper, we showed that coding style is present in source code and can be used to de-anonymize programmers. But what if only compiled binaries are available, rather than source code? Today we are releasing a new paper showing that coding style can survive compilation. Consequently, we can utilize these stylistic fingerprints via […]
