Category: Digital Infrastructure & Platforms
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Dissecting the (Likely) Forthcoming Repeal of the FCC’s Privacy Rulemaking
Last week, the House and Senate both passed a joint resolution that prevents the new privacy rules from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) from taking effect; the rules were released by the FCC last November, and would have bound Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in the United States to a set of practices concerning the collection and…
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How to buy physical goods using Bitcoin with improved security and privacy
Bitcoin has found success as a decentralized digital currency, but it is only one step toward decentralized digital commerce. Indeed, creating decentralized marketplaces and mechanisms is a nascent and active area of research. In a new paper, we present escrow protocols for cryptocurrencies that bring us closer to decentralized commerce. In any online sale of…
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Pragmatic advice for buying “Internet of Things” devices
We’re hearing an increasing amount about security flaws in “Internet of Things” devices, such as a “messaging” teddy bear with poor security or perhaps Samsung televisions being hackable to become snooping devices. How are you supposed to make purchasing decisions for all of these devices when you have no idea how they work or if…
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Mitigating the Increasing Risks of an Insecure Internet of Things
The emergence and proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices on industrial, enterprise, and home networks brings with it unprecedented risk. The potential magnitude of this risk was made concrete in October 2016, when insecure Internet-connected cameras launched a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on Dyn, a provider of DNS service for many large…
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Concerned about Internet of Things Security?
There is no shortage of warnings about the need to improve security for the Internet of Things: The Guardian asks “Can we secure the internet of things in time to prevent another cyber-attack?”. The New York Times calls for “Stepping up Security for an Internet of Things world”. Technology Review reports that Security Experts Warn…
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Bitcoin is unstable without the block reward
With Miles Carlsten, Harry Kalodner, and Matt Weinberg, I have a new paper titled On the instability of Bitcoin without the block reward, which Harry will present at ACM CCS next week. The paper predicts that miner incentives will start to go haywire as Bitcoin rewards shift from block rewards to transaction fees, based on…
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The Effect of DNS on Tor’s Anonymity
This blog post is joint work with Benjamin Greschbach, Tobias Pulls, Laura M. Roberts, and Nick Feamster. Counting almost two million daily users and 7,000 relays, the Tor network is the largest anonymity network operating today. The Tor Project is maintaining a privacy-enhanced version of the popular Firefox web browser—Tor Browser—that bounces its network traffic…
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Bitcoin’s history deserves to be better preserved
Much of Bitcoin’s development has happened in the open in a transparent manner through the mailing list and the bitcoin-dev IRC channel. The third-party website BitcoinStats maintains logs of the bitcoin-dev IRC chats. [1] This resource has proved useful is linked to by other sources such as the Bitcoin wiki. When reading a blog post…
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A Peek at A/B Testing in the Wild
[Dillon Reisman was previously an undergraduate at Princeton when he worked on a neat study of the surveillance implications of cookies. Now he’s working with the WebTAP project again in a research + engineering role. — Arvind Narayanan] In 2014, Facebook revealed that they had manipulated users’ news feeds for the sake of a psychology study…
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The Interconnection Measurement Project
Building on the March 11 release of the “Revealing Utilization at Internet Interconnection Points” working paper, today, CITP is excited to announce the launch of the Interconnection Measurement Project. This unprecedented initiative includes the launch of a project-specific website and the ongoing collection, analysis, and release of capacity and utilization data from ISP interconnection points.…