Author: webmaint

Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing is reporting on Franzi Roesner’s latest project, ShareMeNot. Cory writes: “[ShareMeNot is] a Firefox Add-On that defangs social media buttons like the Facebook ‘Like’ button (and others) so that they don’t transmit any information about your browsing habits to these services until (and unless) you click on them. That means that merely visiting a page with a Like or a Tweet or a +1 button (like this one) doesn’t generate a data-trail for the companies that operate those services, but you still get the benefit of the buttons, that is, if you click them, they still work. Smart.” Also involved are UW CSE faculty members Yoshi Kohno and David Wetherall.

Each year, UW Computer Science and Engineering and Microsoft Research host a Summer Research Institute in Computer Science, bringing together dozens of the world’s top researchers for several days to discuss an important emerging topic.

This year’s UW-MSR Summer Research Institute is taking place July 24-27 at Suncadia Resort, located in the Cascades, ninety minutes southeast of Seattle. The topic is “Security and Privacy for a Consumer, Cloud World.” The goal is to identify new directions for consumer and cloud computing, discuss the challenges for protecting security and privacy in a consumer and cloud computing world, and explore directions for mitigating those challenges. The Institute brings together researchers and practitioners from diverse but relevant areas such as computer security, cryptography, mobile systems, cloud computing, systems and networking, and HCI. The organizers are Yoshi Kohno (UW CSE), David Molnar (MSR), and Helen Wang (MSR).

This is the fifteenth UW-MSR Summer Research Institute. Learn more about this year’s UW-MSR Summer Research Institute here.

Alexei Czeskis and Jacob Appelbaum are helping to design a privacy preserving registry for the Washington State medical marijuana data. Their effort was recently mentioned a Seattle Weekly article, available here.

Jake and Alexei have been working directly and indirectly with a variety of stakeholders like the Washington State ACLU, legislators, law enforcement, and Cannabis Defense Coalition to make sure that a technology can be designed to meet the variety of needs and the (sometimes conflicting) goals. Jake’s and Alexei’s work have helped inform the technical language in Senate Bill SB 5073 and more recently — SB 5955.

UW CSE PhD Student Roxana Geambasu has just accepted a tenure-track faculty position in the Department of Computer Science at Columbia University. Congratulations Professor Roxana!!

The UW CSE Security Competition Team was recognized at the 2011 VISA Global Security Summit in Washington DC. Besides high ranking VISA security personnel, the former NSA and CIA chief, the former Attorney General, a four start General, personnel from the US Secret Service, and others were present.

The team was also recently featured in The Christian Science Monitor. The story is available in the magazine and online here.

The UW CSE Security Competition Team was featured today in a story on 97.3 KIRO FM. You can read the article here and can also listen to the full audio interview here.

“Keypad: An auditing file system for theft-prone devices,” a paper describing a new file system that enhances data security on mobile devices, has been named Best Student Paper at this year’s EuroSys 2011 conference. The paper was authored by UW CSE graduate students Roxana Geambasu and John P. John and UW CSE faculty members Steve Gribble, Yoshi Kohno, and Hank Levy.

Congratulations!

The UW CSE computer security competition team consisting of Alexei Czeskis (team captain), Karl Koscher (team co-founder), Ian Finder, Mary Pimenova, Cullen Walsh, Baron Oldenburg, Conrad Meyer, and Mark Jordan — coached by Melody Kadenko — just won the National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition!

The finals, held April 9 and 10, featured 9 teams from across the nation — the winners of 9 regional competitions.

Congratulations!!!!!

Update (4.11.2011): The Seattle Times just wrote an article about the team’s win.

Update (4.13.2011): UW Today also wrote an article about the team.

UW CSE Security Lab member Karl Koscher just won the College of Engineering Ford Motor Company Fellowship. Congratulations Karl!

From Freedom to Tinker: “Today, the public learned of a previously undisclosed compromise of a trusted Certificate Authority — one of the entities that issues certificates attesting to the identity of “secure” web sites. Last week, Comodo quietly issued a command via its certificate revocation servers designed to tell browsers to no longer accept 9 certificates. …

“This implied that the certificates were likely malicious, and may even been used by a third-party to impersonate secure sites. …

“Clearly, something exceptional happened behind the scenes. Security hacker Jacob Appelbaum did some fantastic detective work using the EFF’s SSL Observatory data and discovered that all of the certificates in question originated from Comodo — perhaps from one of the many affiliated companies that issues certificates under Comodo’s authority via their ‘Registration Authority’ (RA) program. Evidently, someone had figured out how to successfully attack Comodo or one of their RAs, or had colluded with them in getting some invalid certs.”

Jacob Appelbaum is a UW Security and Privacy Lab researcher and a Tor developer. You can read more about Jacob’s discoveries here.