Month: October 2011

Recently, Miro Enev traveled to CCS 2011 to present his work with Sidhant Gupta on uncovering the depth of information leakage available on the modern powerline. The paper suggests that it is possible to tell what someone is watching on a TV by collecting a short period of unintentionally generated electromagnetic interference (EMI) from any wall socket in a home (not just the socket connected to the TV). This research was based on in-lab and in-home experiments with 8 TVs ranging in size, technology, and manufacturer, and a dataset of 20 movies plus over-the-air broadcasts. Miro and Sidhant also demonstrated the ability to train a neural network to predict the EMI of a television without need for physical access to the device. Full details in the paper. UW faculty members Shwetak Patel and Tadayoshi Kohno were also involved.

Earlier this year UW CSE security researcher Franzi Roesner released ShareMeNot — a Firefox plugin designed to help users avoid unwanted tracking by third party social media buttons on the Web while still allowing the user to use those buttons when they wish. ShareMeNot handles the Facebook Like button, the Google +1 button, and others.

Last night Franzi presented a poster of her work at the annual UW CSE Industrial Affiliates meeting. The Madrona Venture Group was extremely impressed by Franzi’s work and awarded her the Madrona Prize Runner Up Award. Congratulations Franzi!

UW CSE’s Karl Koscher is headed to Taiwan to give the opening talk at the 6th Workshop on Embedded Systems Security (WESS 2011) along with UCSD PhD student (and UW undergraduate alumnus) Steve Checkoway. Karl and Steve will be presenting their recent research results on automotive computer security, co-authored with UW’s Alexei Czeskis, Franziska Roesner, Shwetak Patel, and Yoshi Kohno and UCSD’s Damon McCoy, Brian Kantor, Danny Anderson, Hovav Shacham, and Stefan Savage. You can read about their research at http://www.autosec.org/faq.html.