End of term

April 22, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ Leave a comment

We've reached the end of term again on The Morning Paper, and I'll be taking a two week break. The Morning Paper will resume on Tuesday 7th May (since Monday 6th is a public holiday in the UK). My end of term tradition is to highlight a few of the papers from the term that ... Continue Reading

Keeping master green at scale

April 18, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 2 Comments

Keeping master green at scale Ananthanarayanan et al., EuroSys'19 This paper provides a fascinating look at a key part of Uber’s software delivery machine. With a monorepo, and many thousands of engineers concurrently committing changes, keeping the build green, and keeping commit-to-live latencies low, is a major challenge. This paper introduces a change management system ... Continue Reading

Teaching rigorous distributed systems with efficient model checking

April 17, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 7 Comments

Teaching rigorous distributed systems with efficient model checking Michael et al., EuroSys'19 On the surface you might think today’s paper selection an odd pick. It describes the labs environment, DSLabs, developed at the University of Washington to accompany a course in distributed systems. During the ten week course, students implement four different assignments: an exactly-once ... Continue Reading

Time protection: the missing OS abstraction

April 15, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 11 Comments

Time protection: the missing OS abstraction Ge et al., EuroSys'19 Ever since the prominent emergence of timing-based microarchitectural attacks (e.g. Spectre, Meltdown, and friends) I’ve been wondering what we can do about them. When a side-channel is based on observing improved performance, a solution that removes the improved performance can work, but is clearly undesirable. ... Continue Reading

Master of web puppets: abusing web browsers for persistent and stealthy computation

April 12, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 9 Comments

Master of web puppets: abusing web browsers for persistent and stealthy computation Papadopoulus et al., NDSS'19 UPDATE 2019-04-14: An author update has been published for this paper which details that with current browser versions, ServiceWorkers can only stay alive for about a minute after the user navigates away from the site. This mitigates the main ... Continue Reading

Don’t trust the locals: investigating the prevalence of persistent client-side cross-site scripting in the wild

April 10, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 21 Comments

Don’t trust the locals: investigating the prevalence of persistent client-side cross-site scripting in the wild Steffens et al., NDSS'19 Does your web application make use of local storage? If so, then like many developers you may well be making the assumption that when you read from local storage, it will only contain the data that ... Continue Reading

How bad can it git? Characterizing secret leakage in public GitHub repositories

April 8, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 19 Comments

How bad can it git? Characterizing secret leakage in public GitHub repositories Meli et al., NDSS'19 On the one hand you might say there’s no new news here. We know that developers shouldn’t commit secrets, and we know that secrets leaked to GitHub can be discovered and exploited very quickly. On the other hand, this ... Continue Reading

Ginseng: keeping secrets in registers when you distrust the operating system

April 5, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ Leave a comment

Ginseng: keeping secrets in registers when you distrust the operating system Yun & Zhong et al., NDSS'19 Suppose you did go to the extreme length of establishing an unconditional root of trust for your system, even then, unless every subsequent piece of code you load is also fully trusted (e.g., formally verified) then you’re open ... Continue Reading

Establishing software root of trust unconditionally

April 3, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 4 Comments

Establishing software root of trust unconditionally Gligor & Woo, NDSS'19 The authors won a best paper award for this work at NDSS this year. The main result is quite something, but as you might expect the lines of argument are detailed and not always easy to follow (and certainly not critically!) for non-experts like me. ... Continue Reading

The crux of voice (in)security: a brain study of speaker legitimacy detection

April 1, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 1 Comment

The crux of voice (in)security: a brain study of speaker legitimacy detection Neupane et al., NDSS'19 The key results of this paper are easy to understand, but the implications are going to take us a long time to unravel. Speech morphing (voice morphing) is the process of translating a speaker’s voice to sound like a ... Continue Reading

the morning paper

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Month: April 2019