Category: Privacy & Security
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We can de-anonymize programmers from coding style. What are the implications?
In a recent post, I talked about our paper showing how to identify anonymous programmers from their coding styles. We used a combination of lexical features (e.g., variable name choices), layout features (e.g., spacing), and syntactic features (i.e., grammatical structure of source code) to represent programmers’ coding styles. The previous post focused on the overall…
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Lenovo Pays For Careless Product Decisions
The discovery last week that Lenovo laptops had been shipping with preinstalled adware that left users wide open to security exploitation triggered a lot of righteous anger in the tech community. David Auerbach at Slate wrote that Lenovo had “betrayed its customers and sold out their security”. Whenever a big company does something so monumentally…
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Nine awesome Bitcoin projects at Princeton
As promised, here are the final project presentations from the Bitcoin and cryptocurrency technologies class I taught at Princeton. I encouraged students to build something real, rather than toy class projects, and they delivered. I hope you’ll find these presentations interesting and educational, and that you build on the work presented here (I’ve linked to the projects…
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Sign up now for the Bitcoin and cryptocurrency technologies online course
At Princeton I taught a course on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency technologies during the semester that just ended. Joe Bonneau unofficially co-taught it with me. Based on student feedback and what we accomplished in the course, it was extremely successful. Next week I’ll post videos of all the final project presentations. The course was based on…
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Anonymous programmers can be identified by analyzing coding style
Every programmer learns to code in a unique way which results in distinguishing “fingerprints” in coding style. These fingerprints can be used to compare the source code of known programmers with an anonymous piece of source code to find out which one of the known programmers authored the anonymous code. This method can aid in…
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Cyberterrorism or Cybervandalism?
When hackers believed by the U.S. government to have been sponsored by the state of North Korea infiltrated Sony Pictures’ corporate network and leaked reams of sensitive documents, the act was quickly labeled an act of “cyberterrorism.” When hackers claiming to be affiliated with ISIS subsequently hijacked the YouTube and Twitter accounts of the U.S.…
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Consensus in Bitcoin: One system, many models
At a technical level, the Bitcoin protocol is a clever solution to the consensus problem in computer science. The idea of consensus is very general — a number of participants together execute a computation to come to agreement about the state of the world, or a subset of it that they’re interested in. Because of…
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On the Sony Pictures Security Breach
The recent security breach at Sony Pictures is one of the most embarrassing breaches ever, though not the most technically sophisticated. The incident raises lots of interesting questions about the current state of security and public policy.