Information flow reveals prediction limits in online social activity Bagrow et al., arVix 2017 If I know your friends, then I know a lot about you! Suppose you don’t personally use a given app/service, and so the provider doesn’t have data on you directly. However, many of your friends do use the app/service, and there’s … Continue reading Information flow reveals prediction limits in online social activity
Author: adriancolyer
Venture Partner with Accel in London, author of 'The Morning Paper'
Tracking ransomware end-to-end
Tracking ransomware end-to-end Huang et al., IEEE Security & Privacy 2018 With thanks to Elie Bursztein for bringing this paper to my attention. You get two for the price of one with today’s paper! Firstly, it’s a fascinating insight into the ransomware business and how it operates, with data gathered over a period of two … Continue reading Tracking ransomware end-to-end
Three years of the Right To Be Forgotten
Three years of the Right To Be Forgotten Bertram et al., 2018 With thanks to Elie Bursztein for bringing this paper to my attention. See also Elie’s blog post ‘Insights about the first three years of the Right To Be Forgotten requests at Google.’ Following on from the GDPR we looked at yesterday, and which … Continue reading Three years of the Right To Be Forgotten
On purpose and by necessity: compliance under the GDPR
On purpose and by necessity: compliance under the GDPR Basin et al., FC'18 A year ago it seemed like hardly anyone in a technical role had heard of GDPR. Now it seems to be front of mind for everyone! Not surprising perhaps, as it comes into force on the 25th May this year. In today’s … Continue reading On purpose and by necessity: compliance under the GDPR
Designing secure Ethereum smart contracts: a finite state machine approach
Designing secure Ethereum smart contracts: a finite state machine based approach Mavridou & Laszka, FC’18 You could be forgiven for thinking I’m down on smart contracts, but I actually think they’re a very exciting development that opens up a whole new world of possibilities. That’s why I’m so keen to see better ways of developing … Continue reading Designing secure Ethereum smart contracts: a finite state machine approach
A quantitive analysis of the impact of arbitrary blockchain content on Bitcoin
A quantitative analysis of the impact of arbitrary blockchain content on Bitcoin Matzutt et al., FC’18 We’re leaving NDSS behind us now, and starting this week with a selection of papers from FC’18. First up is a really interesting analysis of what’s in the Bitcoin blockchain. But this isn’t your typical analysis of transactions, addresses, … Continue reading A quantitive analysis of the impact of arbitrary blockchain content on Bitcoin
When coding style survives compilation: de-anonymizing programmers from executable binaries
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 When coding style survives compilation: de-anonymizing programmers from executable binaries
Exposing congestion attack on emerging connected vehicle based traffic signal control
Exposing congestion attack on emerging connected vehicle based signal traffic signal control Chen et al., NDSS’18 I selected this paper as a great case study on the need to consider adversarial scenarios when deploying IoT and smart city systems. It was also an eye opener to me just how quickly the U.S. Department of Transport … Continue reading Exposing congestion attack on emerging connected vehicle based traffic signal control
Game of missuggestions: semantic analysis of search autocomplete manipulation
Game of missuggestions: semantic analysis of search autocomplete manipulations Wang et al., NDSS’18 Maybe I’ve been pretty naive here, but I really had no idea about the extent of manipulation (blackhat SEO) of autocomplete suggestions for search until I read this paper. But when you think about it, it makes sense that people would be … Continue reading Game of missuggestions: semantic analysis of search autocomplete manipulation
JavaScript Zero: real JavaScript, and zero side-channel attacks
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 JavaScript Zero: real JavaScript, and zero side-channel attacks
the morning paper 