Category: Privacy & Security
-
Bitcoin Mining Now Dominated by One Pool
The big news in the Bitcoin world, is that one entity, called GHash, seems to be in control of more than half of all of the mining power. A part of Bitcoin’s appeal has been its distributed nature: the idea that no one party is in control but the system operates through the cooperative action…
-
Encryption as protest
As a computer scientist who studies Privacy-Enhancing Technologies, I remember my surprise when I first learned that some groups of people view and use them very differently than I’m used to. In computer science, PETs are used for protecting anonymity or confidentiality, often via application of cryptography, and are intended to be bullet-proof against an…
-
Why King George III Can Encrypt
[This is a guest post by Wenley Tong, Sebastian Gold, Samuel Gichohi, Mihai Roman, and Jonathan Frankle, undergraduates in the Privacy Technologies seminar that I offered for the second time in Spring 2014. They did an excellent class project on the usability of email encryption.] PGP and similar email encryption standards have existed since the early…
-
Wickr: Putting the “non” in anonymity
[Let’s welcome new CITP blogger Pete Zimmerman, a first-year graduate student in the computer security group at Princeton. — Arvind Narayanan] Following the revelations of wide-scale surveillance by US intelligence agencies and their allies, a myriad of services offering end-to-end encrypted communications have cropped up to take advantage of the increasing demand for privacy from surveillance.…
-
Increasing Civic Engagement Requires Understanding Why People Have Chosen Not to Participate
Last month, I was a poll watcher for the mayoral primary in Washington, DC. My duties were to monitor several polling places to confirm that each Precinct Captain was ensuring that the City’s election laws were being followed on site; in particular, that everyone who believed that they were qualified to vote was able to…
-
Threshold signatures and Bitcoin wallet security: A menu of options
Before Bitcoin can mature as a currency, the security of wallets must be improved. Previously, I motivated the need for sharing Bitcoin wallets using threshold signatures as a means to greatly increase their resilience to theft. For corporate users, threshold signatures enable cryptographically secure access control. For individuals, threshold signatures can be used to build…
-
Google Spain and the “Right to Be Forgotten”
The European Court of Justice (CJEU) has decided the Google Spain case, which involves the “right to be forgotten” on the Internet. The case was brought by Mario Costeja González, a lawyer who, back in 1998, had unpaid debts that resulted in the attachment and public auction of his real estate. Notices of the auctions,…
-
Will Greenwald's New Book Reveal How to Conduct Warrantless Bulk Surveillance on Americans from Abroad?
Tomorrow, Glenn Greenwald’s highly anticipated book ‘No Place to Hide’ goes on sale. Apart from personal accounts on working with whisteblower Edward Snowden in Hong Kong and elsewhere, Mr. Greenwald announced that he will reveal new surveillance operations by Western intelligence agencies. In the last weeks, Sharon Goldberg and I have been finishing a paper…
-
The importance of anonymous cryptocurrencies
Recently I was part of a collaboration on Mixcoin, a set of proposals for improving Bitcoin’s anonymity. A natural question to ask is: why do this research? Before I address that, an even more basic question is whether or not Bitcoin is already anonymous. You may have seen back-and-forth arguments on this question. So which…
-
Mesh Networks Won't Fix Internet Security
There’s no doubt that the quality of tech reporting in major newspapers has improved in recent years. It’s rare these days to see a story in, say, the New York Times whose fundamental technical premise is wrong. Still, it does happen occasionally—as it did yesterday. Yesterday’s Times ran a story gushing about mesh networks as…