Category: Privacy & Security
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The AT&T Deal Is About the Data
Most of the mainstream media coverage of the proposed AT&T acquisition of Time Warner has missed an important risk. Much of the discussion has focused on the potential market power the combined entity would have to raise prices, limit choice or otherwise disadvantage consumers. A primary motivation for the deal, however, as readers of Freedom…
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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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Are you really anonymous online?
As you browse the internet, online advertisers track nearly every site you visit, amassing a trove of information on your habits and preferences. When you visit a news site, they might see you’re a fan of basketball, opera and mystery novels, and accordingly select ads tailored to your tastes. Advertisers use this information to create…
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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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Improving Bitcoin’s Privacy and Scalability with TumbleBit
Last week we unveiled TumbleBit, a new anonymous payments scheme that addresses two major technical challenges faced by Bitcoin today: (1) scaling Bitcoin to meet increasing use, and (2) protecting the privacy of payments made via Bitcoin. Our proof-of-concept source code and a pre-print of the latest version of our paper were both posted online…
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Routing Detours: Can We Avoid Nation-State Surveillance?
Since 2013, Brazil has taken significant steps to build out their networking infrastructure to thwart nation-state mass surveillance. For example, the country is deploying a 3,500-mile fiber cable from Fortaleza, Brazil to Portugal; they’ve switched their government email system from Microsoft Outlook to a state-built system called Expresso; and they now have the largest IXP…
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Differential Privacy is Vulnerable to Correlated Data — Introducing Dependent Differential Privacy
[This post is joint work with Princeton graduate student Changchang Liu and IBM researcher Supriyo Chakraborty. See our paper for full details. — Prateek Mittal ] The tussle between data utility and data privacy Information sharing is important for realizing the vision of a data-driven customization of our environment. Data that were earlier locked up…
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Security against Election Hacking – Part 2: Cyberoffense is not the best cyberdefense!
State and county election officials across the country employ thousands of computers in election administration, most of them are connected (from time to time) to the internet (or exchange data cartridges with machines that are connected). In my previous post I explained how we must audit elections independently of the computers, so we can trust the…