Category: Digital Infrastructure & Platforms
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How to Assess an E-voting System
Part 1 of a 5-part series If I can shop and bank online, why can’t I vote online? David Jefferson explained in 2011 why internet voting is so difficult to make secure, I summarized again in 2021 why internet voting is still inherently insecure, and many other experts have explained it too. Still, several…
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Dcentral vs. Consensus: Are institutions “frens” or enemies of crypto?
As a part of an ethnographic study on blockchain organizations, I recently attended two major conferences – Dcentral Con and Consensus – held back-to-back in Austin, Texas during a blistering heatwave. My collaborator, Johannes Lenhard, and I had conducted a handful of interviews with angel investors, founders, and venture capitalists, but we’d yet to conduct…
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NJ agrees No Internet voting in July, vague about November
A formal settlement agreement has been submitted to the NJ Superior Court regarding online ballot access in the 2020 elections. On May 4, 2020, New Jersey’s Division of Elections was caught trying to adopt vote-by-Internet on the stealth, even though the law forbids it. That is, not only is Internet voting inherently insecurable, there’s a…
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The CheapBit of Fitness Trackers Apps
Yan Shvartzshnaider (@ynotez) and Madelyn Sanfilippo (@MrsMRS_PhD) Fitness trackers are “[devices] that you can wear that records your daily physical activity, as well as other information about your health, such as your heart rate” [Oxford Dictionary]. The increasing popularity of wearable devices offered by Apple, Google, Nike inadvertently led cheaper versions to flood the market,…
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Watching You Watch: The Tracking Ecosystem of Over-the-Top TV Streaming Devices
By Hooman Mohajeri Moghaddam, Gunes Acar, Ben Burgess, Arunesh Mathur, Danny Y. Huang, Nick Feamster, Ed Felten, Prateek Mittal, and Arvind Narayanan By 2020 one third of US households are estimated to “cut the cord”, i.e., discontinue their multichannel TV subscriptions and switch to internet-connected streaming services. Over-the-Top (“OTT”) streaming devices such as Roku and…
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The Trust Architecture of Blockchain: Kevin Werbach at CITP
Rather than removing the need for trust, blockchain offers a new architecture of trust, according to Kevin Werbach, today’s speaker at CITP.
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User Perceptions of Smart Home Internet of Things (IoT) Privacy
by Noah Apthorpe This post summarizes a research paper, authored by Serena Zheng, Noah Apthorpe, Marshini Chetty, and Nick Feamster from Princeton University, which is available here. The paper will be presented at the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW) on November 6, 2018. Smart home Internet of Things (IoT) devices…
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Internet of Things in Context: Discovering Privacy Norms with Scalable Surveys
by Noah Apthorpe, Yan Shvartzshnaider, Arunesh Mathur, Nick Feamster Privacy concerns surrounding disruptive technologies such as the Internet of Things (and, in particular, connected smart home devices) have been prevalent in public discourse, with privacy violations from these devices occurring frequently. As these new technologies challenge existing societal norms, determining the bounds of “acceptable” information handling…
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Fast Web-based Attacks to Discover and Control IoT Devices
By Gunes Acar, Danny Y. Huang, Frank Li, Arvind Narayanan, and Nick Feamster Two web-based attacks against IoT devices made the rounds this week. Researchers Craig Young and Brannon Dorsey showed that a well known attack technique called “DNS rebinding” can be used to control your smart thermostat, detect your home address or extract unique…
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Announcing IoT Inspector: Studying Smart Home IoT Device Behavior
By Noah Apthorpe, Danny Y. Huang, Gunes Acar, Frank Li, Arvind Narayanan, Nick Feamster An increasing number of home devices, from thermostats to light bulbs to garage door openers, are now Internet-connected. This “Internet of Things” (IoT) promises reduced energy consumption, more effective health management, and living spaces that react adaptively to users’ lifestyles. Unfortunately,…