[talks] Fwd: REMINDER Anne Edmundson will present her FPO TODAY, Wednesday, May 16, 2018 at 2:00 pm CS402

[Barbara A. Mooring]

Anne Edmundson will present her FPO today, Wednesday, May 16, 2018 at 2:00 pm in CS402.

Committee:

Nick Feasmster, Adviser - Princeton University
Arvind Narayanan - Princeton University
Prateek Mittal - Princeton University

All are welcomed to attend.

Title:  Privacy Infrastructure for Content and Communications


Abstract:

Citizens’ privacy is coming under greater threat as an increasing number of entities can
access user data. A powerful adversary, such as a nation-state, can gain access to user
data using a broad range of techniques, from privately tapping wires and collecting
traffic to serving warrants or subpoenas for user data. Protecting user privacy in
the face of these types of activities is challenging. Existing protocol encryption such
as TLS is not sufficient, since a wide range of data, from DNS lookups to server
access logs, may be visible to eavesdroppers or subject to data requests. In this
dissertation, I develop new techniques that demonstrate that three aspects of the
existing Internet infrastructure, specifically routing, hosting, and naming, can be
used to counter surveillance.

First, I study the current state of routing by measuring which countries are on
the paths between users and popular websites. I then evaluate di↵erent methods for
routing Internet traffic around unfavorable countries, and based on these findings, I
design and implement RAN, a lightweight system that routes a client’s web traffic
around specified countries with no modifications to client software.
Second, I describe modifications to content hosting that prevent a powerful adversary
such as a nation-state from gaining access to a user’s requests for certain
Web content. In today’s Internet, Content Distribution Networks (CDNs) have rich
information both about the content they are serving and the users who are requesting
that content. Access to this type of information makes CDNs a target for requests for
data about users’ browsing activities. To counter this threat, I developed Oblivious
CDN (OCDN), which hides from the CDN both the content it is serving and the
users who are requesting that content.

In the last part of this dissertation, I explore how the naming infrastructure currently
compromises client privacy by looking at conventional DNS as well as onion
services. I highlight fundamental issues with both types of domain lookups, and
present Oblivious DNS (ODNS) as a new approach to protecting privacy by decoupling
client identities from the domains they are looking up.


Barbara A. Mooring
Interim Graduate Coordinator
Computer Science Department
Princeton University

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