Author: Ed Felten
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On the Sony Pictures Security Breach
The recent security breach at Sony Pictures is one of the most embarrassing breaches ever, though not the most technically sophisticated. The incident raises lots of interesting questions about the current state of security and public policy.
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"Information Sharing" Should Include the Public
The FBI recently issued a warning to U.S. businesses about the possibility of foreign-based malware attacks. According to a Reuters story by Jim Finkle: The five-page, confidential “flash” FBI warning issued to businesses late on Monday provided some technical details about the malicious software used in the attack. It provided advice on how to respond…
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PCLOB testimony on "Defining Privacy"
This morning I’m testifying at a hearing of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, on the topic of “Defining Privacy”. Here is the text of my oral testimony. (This is the text as prepared; there might be minor deviations when I deliver it.) [Update (Nov. 16): video stream of my panel is now available.]
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On the value of encrypting your phone
This is a true story. Yesterday my phone crashed, and it wouldn’t reboot. Actually it would do nothing but reboot, over and over, with a seemingly different error message every time. I tried all of the tricks available to a technically handy person, and nothing worked—I couldn’t get it out of the crash-reboot cycle. So…
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Airport Scanners: How Privacy Risk Leads to Security Risk
Debates about privacy and security tend to assume that the two are in opposition, so that improving privacy tends to degrade security, and vice versa. But often the two go hand in hand so that privacy enhances security. A good example comes from the airport scanner study I wrote about yesterday.
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Researchers Show Flaws in Airport Scanner
Today at the Usenix Security Symposium a group of researchers from UC San Diego and the University of Michigan will present a paper demonstrating flaws in a full-body scaning machine that was used at many U.S. airports. In this post I’ll summarize their findings and discuss the security and policy implications.
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Princeton likely to rescind grade deflation policy
A Princeton faculty committee recommended yesterday that the university rescind its ten-year-old grading guideline that advises faculty to assign grades in the A range to at most 35% of students. The committee issued a report explaining its rationale. The recommendation will probably be accepted and implemented. It’s a good report, and I agree with its…
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Why were CERT researchers attacking Tor?
Yesterday the Tor Project issued an advisory describing a large-scale identification attack on Tor hidden services. The attack started on January 30 and ended when Tor ejected the attackers on July 4. It appears that this attack was the subject of a Black Hat talk that was canceled abruptly. These attacks raise serious questions about…
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On the Ethics of A/B Testing
The discussion triggered by Facebook’s mood manipulation experiment has been enlightening and frustrating at the same time. An enlightening aspect is how it has exposed divergent views on a practice called A/B testing, in which a company provides two versions of its service to randomly-chosen groups of users, and then measures how the users react.…
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Privacy Implications of Social Media Manipulation
The ethical debate about Facebook’s mood manipulation experiment has rightly focused on Facebook’s manipulation of what users saw, rather than the “pure privacy” issue of which information was collected and how it was used. It’s tempting to conclude that because Facebook didn’t change their data collection procedures, the experiment couldn’t possibly have affected users’ privacy…
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Facebook's Emotional Manipulation Study: When Ethical Worlds Collide
The research community is buzzing about the ethics of Facebook’s now-famous experiment in which it manipulated the emotional content of users’ news feeds to see how that would affect users’ activity on the site. (The paper, by Adam Kramer of Facebook, Jamie Guillory of UCSF, and Jeffrey Hancock of Cornell, appeared in Proceedings of the…
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Bitcoin Mining Now Dominated by One Pool
The big news in the Bitcoin world, is that one entity, called GHash, seems to be in control of more than half of all of the mining power. A part of Bitcoin’s appeal has been its distributed nature: the idea that no one party is in control but the system operates through the cooperative action…