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Date Details
09/05/14 Orientation and logistics (attendance strongly recommended)
Presenter: Amir Houmansadr
Required reading:
- None
Suggested reading:
- 'I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy
- Privacy-enhancing technologies for the Internet III: Ten years later
A. Anonymous Communications
09/12/14 Traditional systems
Required reading:
- Tor: The Second-Generation Onion Router (Presenter: Nicholas Braga)
- Mixminion: Design of a Type III Anonymous Remailer Protocol (Presenter: Demetre Lavigne)
Suggested reading:
- Untraceable electronic mail, return addresses, and digital pseudonyms
- Shining light in dark places: Understanding the Tor network
- Crowds: Anonymity for web transactions
09/19/14 Attacks on anonymity
Required reading:
- Tracking Anonymous Peer-to-Peer VoIP Calls on the Internet (Presenter: Amir)
- AS-awareness in Tor path selection (Presenter: Pinar Ozisik)
Suggested reading:
- Low-cost traffic analysis of Tor
- RAINBOW: A Robust And Invisible Non-Blind Watermark for Network Flows
- Timing analysis in low-latency mix networks: Attacks and defenses
- Stealthy Traffic Analysis of Low-Latency Anonymous Communication Using Throughput Fingerprinting
09/26/14 Alternative anonymity systems
Required reading:
- Dissent: Accountable Anonymous Group Messaging (Presenter: Pinar)
- ANDaNA: Anonymous Named Data Networking Application (Presenter: Nicholas Braga)
Suggested reading:
- Scalable Onion Routing with Torsk
- ShadowWalker: Peer-to-Peer Anonymous Communication Using Redundant Structured Topologies
- In Search of an Anonymous and Secure Lookup: Attacks on Structured Peer-to-Peer Anonymous Communication Systems
- NISAN: Network Information Service for Anonymization Networks
- Octopus: An Anonymous and Secure DHT Lookup
- LAP: Lightweight Anonymity and Privacy
- Towards Efficient Traffic-analysis Resistant Anonymity Networks
B. Internet Censorship Circumvention
10/03/14 Traditional circumvention systems
Required reading:
- rBridge: User Reputation based Tor Bridge Distribution with Privacy Preservation (Presenter: Misha Badov)
- Technical analysis of the Ultrasurf proxying software (Presenter: Dan Zhang)
Suggested reading:
- A taxonomy of Internet censorship and anti-censorship
- Psihon or Ultrasurf
- CORDON — A Taxonomy of Internet Censorship Resistance Strategies
- How China Is Blocking Tor
10/10/14 From the Parrots to the Parasites
Required reading: (pick one from the first two papers, and one from the other two for review)
- StegoTorus: A Camouflage Proxy for the Tor Anonymity System (Presenter: Amir)
- The Parrot is Dead: Observing Unobservable Network Communications (Presenter: Amir)
- I want my voice to be heard: IP over Voice-over-IP for unobservable censorship circumvention (Presenter: Amir)
- CloudTransport: Using Cloud Storage for Censorship-Resistant Networking (Presenter: Amir)
Suggested reading:
- SkypeMorph: Protocol Obfuscation for Tor Bridges
- CensorSpoofer: Asymmetric Communication with IP Spoofing for Censorship-ResistantWeb Browsing
- SWEET: Serving the Web by Exploiting Email Tunnels
- Cover your ACKs: pitfalls of covert channel censorship circumvention
10/17/14 Class Cancelled due to Faculty Retreat.
10/24/14 Decoy routing circumvention
Required reading:
- Cirripede: Circumvention Infrastructure using Router Redirection with Plausible Deniability (Presenter: Amir)
- No Direction Home: The True Cost of Routing Around Decoys (Presenter: Amir)
Suggested reading:
- Telex: Anticensorship in the Network Infrastructure
- Decoy routing: Toward unblockable internet communication
- Routing Around Decoys
- Optimizing the Placement of Implicit Proxies
10/31/14 Midterm project reviews
Required reading:
- None, happy Halloween!
C. Other Privacy-Enhancing Solutions
11/07/14 Privacy-preserving social networking
Required reading:
- Persona: an online social network with user-defined privacy (Presenter: Dan Zhang)
- Social Networking with Frientegrity: Privacy and Integrity with an Untrusted Provider (Presenter: Amir)
Suggested reading:
- Cachet: A Decentralized Architecture for Privacy Preserving Social Networking with Caching
- Safebook: a Privacy Preserving Online Social Network Leveraging on Real-Life Trust
- EASiER: encryption-based access control in social networks with efficient revocation
- PeerSoN: P2P Social Networking — Early Experiences and Insights
11/14/14 Privacy-preserving storage and computation
Required reading:
- Vanish: Increasing Data Privacy with Self-Destructing Data (Presenter: Demetre Lavigne)
- PIR-Tor: Scalable Anonymous Communication Using Private Information Retrieval (Presenter: David Wemhoener)
Suggested reading:
- Defeating Vanish with Low-Cost Sybil Attacks Against Large DHTs
- Private Information Retrieval: An Overview And Current Trends
- On the Computational Practicality of Private Information Retrieval
- ObliviStore: High Performance Oblivious Cloud Storage
11/21/14 Other privacy-preserving related topics
Required reading:
- A Scanner Darkly: Protecting User Privacy from Perceptual Applications (Presenter: Misha Badov)
- Robust De-anonymization of Large Sparse Datasets (Presenter: David Wemhoener)
Suggested reading:
- ObliviAd: Provably Secure and Practical Online Behavioral Advertising
- AnonySense: Privacy-Aware People-Centric Sensing
- Privacy-Aware Personalization for Mobile Advertising
- Trawling for Tor Hidden Services: Detection, Measurement, Deanonymization
11/28/14 Class Cancelled due to Thanksgiving.
Required reading:
- Just enjoy the turkey!
12/05/14 Final project presentations