Author: Steve Roosa

  • Privacy Threat Model for Mobile

    Evaluating privacy vulnerabilities in the mobile space can be a difficult and ad hoc process for developers, publishers, regulators, and researchers. This is due, in significant part, to the absence of a well-developed and widely accepted privacy threat model. With 1 million UDIDs posted on the Internet this past week, there is an urgent need…

  • The Flawed Legal Architecture of the Certificate Authority Trust Model

    Researchers have recently criticized the Certificate Authority Trust Model — which involves the issuance and use of digital certificates to authenticate the identity of websites to end-users — because of an array of technical and institutional problems. The criticism is significant not only because of the systemic nature of the noted problems, but also because…

  • General Counsel's Role in Shoring Up Authentication Practices Used in Secure Communications

    Business conducted over the Internet has benefited hugely from web-based encryption. Retail sales, banking transactions, and secure enterprise applications have all flourished because of the end-to-end protection offered by encrypted Internet communications. An encrypted communication, however, is only as secure as the process used to authenticate the parties doing the communicating. The major Internet browsers…

  • A Software License Agreement Takes it On the Chin

    [Update: This post was featured on Slashdot.] [Update: There are two discrete ways of asking whether a court decision is “correct.” The first is to ask: is the law being applied the same way here as it has been applied in other cases? We can call this first question the “legal question.” The second is…