When CSI meets public wifi: Inferring your mobile phone password via wifi signals Li et al., CCS 2016 Not that CSI. CSI in this case stands for channel state information, which represents the state of a wireless channel in a signal transmission process. WindTalker is motivated from the observation that keystrokes on mobile devices will … Continue reading When CSI meets public wifi: Inferring your mobile phone password via wifi signals
Author: adriancolyer
Venture Partner with Accel in London, author of 'The Morning Paper'
Leave your phone at the door: side channels that reveal factory floor secrets
Leave your phone at the door: side channels that reveal factory floor secrets Hojjati et al. CCS '16 Here's another reminder of just how powerful modern phones are as espionage devices, packed full of sensors. The short version is that if you place a phone near a manufacturing device (CNC mill or 3D printer in … Continue reading Leave your phone at the door: side channels that reveal factory floor secrets
On formalism in specifications
On formalism in specifications Bertrand Meyer, IEEE Software 1985 Following yesterday’s paper that used formal specification methods to resolve ambiguities and uncover potential vulnerabilities in OAuth 2.0, today’s choice is a 1980’s classic from Bertrand Meyer on the merits of formal specification and what it adds beyond natural language descriptions. With thanks once more to … Continue reading On formalism in specifications
A comprehensive formal security analysis of OAuth 2.0
A comprehensive formal security analysis of OAuth 2.0 Fett et al. CCS '16 Formal methods may not be appropriate in all cases, but there are some places where the rigour they introduce can be a really good idea. Security is one of those places. In today's paper from CCS '16 Fett et al. create a … Continue reading A comprehensive formal security analysis of OAuth 2.0
Scaling Spark in the real world: performance and usability
Scaling Spark in the real world: performance and usability Armbrust et al. VLBD 2015 A short and easy paper from the Databricks team to end the week. Given the pace of development in the Apache Spark world, a paper published in 2015 about enhancements to Spark will of course be a little dated. But this … Continue reading Scaling Spark in the real world: performance and usability
Algorithmic improvements for fast concurrent cuckoo hashing
Algorithmic improvements for fast concurrent cuckoo hashing Li et al, EuroSys 2014 Today’s paper continues the work on optimistic cuckoo hashing that we looked at yesterday, extending it to support multiple writers and even higher throughput. One of the original goals for the research was to take advantage of the hardware transactional memory support in … Continue reading Algorithmic improvements for fast concurrent cuckoo hashing
MemC3: Compact and concurrent Memcache with dumber caching and smarter hashing
MemC3: Compact and Concurrent MemCache with Dumber Caching and Smarter Hashing Fan et al. NSDI 2013 At the core of this paper is an improved hashing algorithm called optimistic cuckoo hashing, and a CLOCK-based eviction algorithm that works in tandem with it. They are evaluated in the context of Memcached, where combined they give up … Continue reading MemC3: Compact and concurrent Memcache with dumber caching and smarter hashing
Getting beyond MVP
Something a little different for today, instead of a new paper I wanted to pause and reflect on the design advice we've been reading from Tony Hoare, Barbara Liskov, and David Parnas among others. In particular, how it can be applied in a situation I've recently been through with a codebase of my own, and … Continue reading Getting beyond MVP
Designing software for ease of extension and contraction
Designing software for ease of extension and contraction Parnas, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 1979 A couple of weeks ago we looked at ‘A design methodology for reliable software systems’. David Parnas posted a comment (thank you!) giving some more insight into the history of Dijkstra’s “levels of abstraction” concept: This paper followed Dijkstra in … Continue reading Designing software for ease of extension and contraction
A Bayesian approach to graphical record linkage and de-duplication
A Bayesian approach to graphical record linkage and de-duplication Steorts et al. AISTATS, 2014 I don't normally cover papers from statistics conferences and journals, but this one caught my eye as addressing a high-value problem. Through a different lens, it also shows some of the challenges in maintaining privacy when it is possible to join … Continue reading A Bayesian approach to graphical record linkage and de-duplication
the morning paper 