Category: Digital Infrastructure & Platforms
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Routing Attacks on Internet Services
by Yixin Sun, Annie Edmundson, Henry Birge-Lee, Jennifer Rexford, and Prateek Mittal [In this post, we discuss a recent thread of research that highlights the insecurity of Internet services due to the underlying insecurity of Internet routing. We hope that this thread facilitates important dialog in the networking, security, and Internet policy communities to drive…
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Is It Time for an Data Sharing Clearinghouse for Internet Researchers?
Today’s Senate hearing with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg will start a long discussion on data collection and privacy from Internet companies. Although the spotlight is currently on Facebook, we shouldn’t forget that the picture is broader: companies from device manufacturers to ISPs collect network traffic and use it for a variety of purposes. The uses that…
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Oblivious DNS: Plugging the Internet’s Biggest Privacy Hole
by Annie Edmundson, Paul Schmitt, Nick Feamster The recent news that Cloudflare is deploying their own DNS recursive resolver has once again raised hopes that users will enjoy improved privacy, since they can send DNS traffic encrypted to Cloudflare, rather than to their ISP. In this post, we explain why this approach only moves your private…
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When The Choice Is To Delete Facebook Or Buy A Loaf Of Bread
By Julieanne Romanosky and Marshini Chetty In the last week, there has been a growing debate around Facebook and privacy. On Twitter, the newly formed #deletefacebook movement calls for users who are upset over the data breach of over 50 million Facebook accounts by Cambridge Analytica to rid themselves of the platform altogether. But like…
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What’s new with BlockSci, Princeton’s blockchain analysis tool
Six months ago we released the initial version of BlockSci, a fast and expressive tool to analyze public blockchains. In the accompanying paper we explained how we used it to answer scientific questions about security, privacy, miner behavior, and economics using blockchain data. BlockSci has a number of other applications including forensics and as an…
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New Jersey Takes Up Net Neutrality: A Summary, and My Experiences as a Witness
On Monday afternoon, I testified before the New Jersey State Assembly Committee on Science, Technology, and Innovation, which is chaired by Assemblyman Andrew Zwicker, who also happens to represent Princeton’s district. On the committee agenda were three bills related to net neutrality. Let’s quickly review the recent events. In December 2017, the Federal Communications Commission…
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Blockchain: What is it good for?
Blockchain and cryptocurrencies are surrounded by world-historic levels of hype and snake oil. For people like me who take the old-fashioned view that technical claims should be backed by sound arguments and evidence, it’s easy to fall into the trap of concluding that there is no there there–and that blockchain and cryptocurrencies are fundamentally useless.…
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Software-Defined Networking: What’s New, and What’s New For Tech Policy?
The Silicon Flatirons Conference on Regulating Computing and Code is taking place in Boulder. The annual conference addresses a range of issues at the intersection of technology and policy and provides an excellent look ahead to the tech policy issues on the horizon, particularly in telecommunications. I was looking forward to yesterday’s panel on “The…
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How have In-Flight Web Page Modification Practices Changed over the Past Ten Years?
When we browse the web, there are many parties and organizations that can see which websites we visit, because they sit on the path between web clients (our computers and mobile devices), and the web servers hosting the sites we request. Most obviously, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are responsible for transmitting our web traffic, but…
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Why the FCC should prevent ISPs from micromanaging our lives
Why the FCC should prevent ISPs from micromanaging our lives by Brett Frischmann and Evan Selinger* Network neutrality prevents broadband Internet service providers from micromanaging our lives online. Constraining the networks this way enables and even empowers Internet users to be active and productive human beings rather than passive consumers. Unfortunately, the network neutrality debate…