Monthly Archives: June 2014

Don’t shoot the demonstrators

Academic papers, Legal issues, Politics, Security economics, Security psychology

Jim Graves, Alessandro Acquisti and I are giving a paper today at WEIS on Experimental Measurement of Attitudes Regarding Cybercrime, which we hope might nudge courts towards more rational sentencing for cybercrime.

At present, sentencing can seem somewhere between random and vindictive. People who commit a fraud online can get off with a tenth of what they’d get if they’d swindled the same amount of money face-to-face; yet people who indulge in political activism – as the Anonymous crowd did – can get hammered with much harsher sentences than they’d get for a comparable protest on the street.

Is this just the behaviour of courts and prosecutors, or does it reflect public attitudes?

We did a number of surveys of US residents and found convincing evidence that it’s the former. Americans want fraudsters to be punished on two criteria: for the value of the damage they do, with steadily tougher punishments for more damage, and for their motivation, where they want people who hack for profit to be punished more harshly than people who hack for political protest.

So Americans, thankfully, are rational. Let’s hope that legislators and prosecutors start listening to their voters.

A Study of Whois Privacy and Proxy Service Abuse

Academic papers, Security economics

Long time readers will recall that last year ICANN published the draft report of our study into the abuse of privacy and proxy services when registering domain names.
At WEIS 2014 I will present our academic paper summarising what we have found — and the summary (as the slides for the talk indicate) is very straightforward:

  • when criminals register domain names for use in online criminality they don’t provide their names and addresses;
  • we collected substantial data to show that this is generally true;
  • in doing so we found that the way in which contact details are hidden varies somewhat depending upon the criminal activity and this gives new insights;
  • meantime, people calling for changes to domain ‘privacy’ and ‘proxy’ services “because they are used by criminals” must understand:
    • the impact of such a policy change on other registrants
    • the limitations of such a policy change on criminals

To give just one example, the registrants of the domain names used for fake pharmacies are the group that uses privacy and proxy services the most (55%) : that’s because a key way in which such pharmacy domains are suppressed is to draw attention to invalid details having been provided when the domain was registered. Privacy and proxy services hide this fakery. In contrast, the registrants of domains that are used to supply child sexual images turn to privacy and proxy services just 29% of the time (only just higher than banks — 28%)… but drawing attention to fallacious registration details is not the approach that is generally taken for this type of content.

Our work provides considerable amounts of hard data to inform the debates around changing the domain Whois system to significantly improve accuracy and usefulness and to prevent misuse. Abolishing privacy and proxy services, if this was even possible, would affect a substantial amount of lawful activity — while criminals currently using these services might be expected to adopt the methods of their peers and instead provide incomplete and inaccurate data. However, insisting that domain registration data was always complete and accurate would mean a great many lawful registrations would need to be updated.

Why bouncing droplets are a pretty good model of quantum mechanics – seminar

Academic papers, News coverage, Seminars

Today Robert Brady and I will be giving a seminar in Cambridge where we will explain Yves Couder’s beautiful bouncing droplet experiments. Droplets bouncing on a vibrating fluid bath show many of the weird phenomena of quantum mechanics including tunneling, diffraction and quantized orbits.

We published a paper on this in January and blogged it at the time, but now we have more complete results. The two-dimensional model of electromagnetism that we see in bouncing droplets goes over to three dimensions too, giving us a better model of transverse sound in superfluids and a better explanation of the Bell test results. Here are the slides.

The talk will be at 4pm in the Centre for Mathematical Sciences.

Security and Human Behaviour 2014

Academic papers, Politics, Security economics, Security psychology, Social networks

I’m liveblogging the Workshop on Security and Human Behaviour which is being held here in Cambridge. The participants’ papers are here and the programme is here. For background, see the liveblogs for SHB 2008-13 which are linked here and here. Blog posts summarising the talks at the workshop sessions will appear as followups below, and audio files will be here.

PhD studentship: Model-based assessment of compromising emanations

Hardware & signals, Jobs

We have a fully funded 3.5-year PhD Studentship on offer, from October 2014, for a research student to work on “Model-based assessment of compromising emanations”. The project aims to improve our understanding of electro-magnetic emissions that are unintentionally emitted by computing equipment, and the eavesdropping risks they pose. In particular, it aims to improve test and measurement procedures (TEMPEST) for computing equipment that processes extremely confidential data. We are looking for an Electrical Engineering, Computer Science or Physics graduate with an interest in electronics, software-defined radio, hardware security, side-channel cryptanalysis, digital signal processing, electromagnetic compatibility, or machine learning.

Check the full advert and contact Dr Markus Kuhn for more information if you are interested in applying, quoting NR03517. Application deadline: 23 June 2014.