Month: March 2018

When coding style survives compilation: de-anonymizing programmers from executable binaries

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 13 Comments
When coding style survives compilation: de-anonymizing programmers from executable binaries Caliskan et al., NDSS’18 As a programmer you have a unique style, and stylometry techniques can be used to fingerprint your style and determine with high probability whether or not a piece of code was written by you. That makes a degree of intuitive sense ... Continue Reading

JavaScript Zero: real JavaScript, and zero side-channel attacks

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 6 Comments
JavaScript Zero: Real JavaScript and zero side-channel attacks Schwarz et al., NDSS’18 We’re moving from the server-side back to the client-side today, with a very topical paper looking at defences against micro-architectural and side-channel attacks in browsers. Since submission of the paper to NDSS’18, this subject grew in prominence of course with the announcement of ... Continue Reading

Synode: understanding and automatically preventing injection attacks on Node.js

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 6 Comments
Synode: understanding and automatically preventing injection attacks on Node.js Staicu et al., NDSS’18 If you’re using JavaScript on the server side (node.js), then you’ll want to understand the class of vulnerabilities described in this paper. JavaScript on the server side doesn’t enjoy some of the same protections as JavaScript running in a browser. In particular, ... Continue Reading

Settling payments fast and private: efficient decentralized routing for path-based transactions

~ Adrian Colyer ~ Leave a comment
Settling payments fast and private: efficient decentralized routing for path-based transactions Roos et al., NDSS’18 Peer-to-peer path-based-transaction (PBT) networks such as the Lightning Network address scalability, efficiency, and interoperability concerns with blockchains through off-chain transactions. They work by establishing decentralised chains of participants through which payments are routed. A PBT network builds on top of ... Continue Reading

Investigating ad transparency mechanisms in social media: a case study of Facebook’s explanations

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 2 Comments
Investigating ad transparency mechanisms in social media: a case study of Facebook’s explanations Andreou et al., NDSS’18 Let me start out by saying that I think it’s good Facebook are making an effort to provide more transparency to advertising. It’s good that Twitter announced they will do something similar too. It’s a shame though that ... Continue Reading

Apps, trackers, privacy, and regulators: a global study of the mobile tracking ecosystem

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 2 Comments
Apps, trackers, privacy, and regulators: a global study of the mobile tracking ecosystem Razaghpanah et al., NDSS’18 Sadly you probably won’t be surprised to learn that this study reveals user tracking is widespread within the mobile app (Android) ecosystem. The focus is on third-party services included in apps, identified by the network domains they try ... Continue Reading