November 12, 2024

Verizon's tracking header: Can they do better?

Verizon’s practice of injecting a unique ID into the HTTP headers of traffic originating on their wireless network has alarmed privacy advocates and researchers. Jonathan Mayer detailed how this header is already being used by third-parties to create zombie cookies. In this post, I summarize just how much information Verizon collects and shares under their […]

How cookies can be used for global surveillance

Today we present an updated version of our paper [0] examining how the ubiquitous use of online tracking cookies can allow an adversary conducting network surveillance to target a user or surveil users en masse.  In the initial version of the study, summarized below, we examined the technical feasibility of the attack. Now we’ve made the […]

Cookies that give you away: The surveillance implications of web tracking

[Today we have another announcement of an exciting new research paper. Undergraduate Dillon Reisman, for his senior thesis, applied our web measurement platform to study some timely questions. -Arvind Narayanan] Over the past three months we’ve learnt that NSA uses third-party tracking cookies for surveillance (1, 2). These cookies, provided by a third-party advertising or analytics network […]

Web measurement for fairness and transparency

[This is the first in a series of posts giving some examples of security-related research in the Princeton computer science department. We’re actively recruiting top-notch students to enter our Ph.D. program, as well as postdocs and visiting scholars. We don’t have enough bandwidth here on the blog to feature everything we do, so we’ll be […]