CITP Blog is hosted by Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy, a research center that studies digital technologies in public life. Here you’ll find comment and analysis from the digital frontier, written by the Center’s faculty, students, and friends.
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Over the past several months, CITP-affiliated Ph.D. student Sarthak Grover and fellow Roya Ensafi been investigating various security and privacy vulnerabilities of Internet of Things (IoT) devices in the home network, to…
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The Web Privacy Problem is a Transparency Problem: Introducing the OpenWPM measurement tool
In a previous blog post I explored the success of our study, The Web Never Forgets, in having a positive impact on web privacy. To ensure a lasting impact, we’ve…
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Do privacy studies help? A Retrospective look at Canvas Fingerprinting
It seems like every month we hear of some new online privacy violation in the news, on topics such as fingerprinting or web tracking. Many of these news stories highlight…
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How Will Consumers Use Faster Internet Speeds?
This week saw an exciting announcement about the experimental deployment of DOCSIS 3.1 in limited markets in the United States, including Philadelphia, Atlanta, and parts of northern California, which will…
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When coding style survives compilation: De-anonymizing programmers from executable binaries
In a recent paper, we showed that coding style is present in source code and can be used to de-anonymize programmers. But what if only compiled binaries are available, rather…
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New Professors' Letter Opposing The Defend Trade Secrets Act of 2015
As Freedom to Tinker readers may recall, I’ve been very concerned about the problems associated with the proposed Defend Trade Secrets Act. Ostensibly designed to combat cyberespionage against United States…
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Provisions: how Bitcoin exchanges can prove their solvency
Millions of Bitcoin users store their bitcoins with online exchanges (e.g. Coinbase, Kraken) which store bitcoins on their customers’ behalf. They present an interface that looks somewhat like an online bank, allowing users to log in and request payments to…
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How is NSA breaking so much crypto?
There have been rumors for years that the NSA can decrypt a significant fraction of encrypted Internet traffic. In 2012, James Bamford published an article quoting anonymous former NSA officials…
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Classified material in the public domain: what's a university to do?
Yesterday I posted some thoughts about Purdue University’s decision to destroy a video recording of my keynote address at its Dawn or Doom colloquium. The organizers had gone dark, and…
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Berkeley releases report on barriers to cybersecurity research
I’m pleased to share this report, as I helped organize this event. Researchers associated with the UC Berkeley School of Information and School of Law, the Berkeley Center for Law…