Steven Englehardt will present his Generals on May 11, 2015 at 2pm in CS 301
Steven Englehardt will present his Generals on May 11, 2015 at 2pm in CS 301. Committee Members: Arvind Narayanan (adviser), Edward Felten, and Nick Feamster Everyone is invited to attend his talk, and those faculty wishing to remain for the oral exam following are welcome to do so. His abstract and reading list follow below. Abstract: Web tracking has been a longstanding issue undermining consumer privacy. The proliferation of a mixed-origin websites, where nearly every site includes third-party content from a relatively small set of providers has given these providers the ability to observe and track a large percentage of a user’s web history. Web measurement has been highly influential in online privacy debates and provided transparency into the tracking ecosystem. In this work, we briefly present the design of a platform for web measurement studies and explore a measurement of surveillance completed using the platform. We highlight the ability of a passive eavesdropper to leverage third-party cookies for mass surveillance, showing how such an adversary can reconstruct nearly 75% of a user’s browsing history in the absence of persistent network identifiers. Finally, we examine the effectiveness of browser-based privacy tools at mitigating the attack. Books: The Tangled Web: A Guide to Securing Modern Web Applications, Michal Zalewski Security Engineering, Ross Andersen: Ch. 1 - 7 Papers:
participants (1)
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Nicki Gotsis