CS4930/5930
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CS4930/5930: Privacy and Censorship, Spring 2019

Week Topics Readings Notes
Part I: Privacy and Anonymity
Week 1 (1/23) Overview Slides
Week 2 (1/28, 30) Definitions
  1. Anonymity Loves Company: Usability and the Network Effect (review + discussion, 1/30)
  2. (Optional) Privacy as Contextual Integrity (long!) Short version part 1 and 2
  3. (Optional) TED talk: We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads | Zeynep Tufekci
 Slides
Week 3 (2/4, 6) k-Anonymity and Mixes
  1. Untraceable electronic mail, return addresses, and digital pseudonyms (discussion, 2/4), wiki page.
  2. k-Anonymity: A method for protecting Privacy (review + discussion, 2/6)
  3. (Video) What is a Virtual Private Network | How VPN works and why VPN is not all you need for privacy
  4. (Optional) The Disadvantages of Free MIX Routes and How to Overcome Them
  5. (Optional) l-Diversity: Privacy Beyond k-Anonymity
 Slides
Week 4 (2/11, 13) Tor
  1. Hiding Routing Information (discussion, 2/11)
  2. Tor: Second Generation Onion Router (review + discussion, 2/13)
  3. (Optional) Roger Dingledine - Why Tor is Slow and What We Are Doing About It: video (quality not consistent throughout), paper
 Onion Routing
Week 5 (2/18, 20) Tor Use
  1. Shining Light in Dark Places: Understanding the Tor Network (discussion, 2/18)
  2. Peeling the Onion’s User Experience Layer: Examining Naturalistic Use of the Tor Browser (guest lecture + discussion, 2/20)
 Slides
Week 6 (2/25, 27) Web tracking
  1. Privacy leakage vs. Protection measures: the growing disconnect (discussion, 2/25)
  2. Detecting and Defending Against Third-Party Tracking on the Web (both video and pdf available, review + discussion, 2/27)
  3. (Optional) Do Not Track and ShareMeNot
  4. (Optional) What Are Supercookies, and Why Are They Dangerous?
  5. (Optional) Flash Cookies and Privacy II: Now with HTML5 and ETag Respawning
Week 7 (3/4, 6) Tracking and fingerprinting
  1. 3/4: Snow day, class cancelled
  2. FPDetective: Dusting the Web for Fingerprinters (discussion, 3/6)
  3. (Optional) How Unique Is Your Web Browser?
  4. (Optional) The Web Never Forgets: Persistent Tracking Mechanisms in the Wild
Week 8 (3/11, 13) Adds, Fake News
  1. Third-Party Web Tracking: Policy and Technology (review + discussion, 3/11)
  2. 3/13: Snow day, class cancelled
  3. (Optional) WSJ: What They Know
  4. (Optional) AdChoices and AdSense
Part II: Censorship and Circumvention
Week 9 (3/18, 20) State of Knowledge
  1. Geographic and Temporal Trends in Fake News Consumption During the 2016 US Presidential Election (discussion, 3/18)
  2. SoK: Towards Grounding Censorship Circumvention in Empiricism (review + discussion, 3/20)
  3. (Optional) Remembering Liu Xiaobo
Week 10 Spring break No class
Week 11 (4/1, 3) Iran, Egypt and Libya
  1. Internet Censorship in Iran: A First Look (discussion, 4/1)
  2. Analysis of Country-wide Internet Outages Caused by Censorship (review + discussion, 4/3)
Week 12 (4/8, 10) Keyword Filtering
  1. Three Researchers, Five Conjectures: An Empirical Analysis of TOM-Skype Censorship and Surveillance (discussion, 4/8)
  2. 4/10: Snow day, class cancelled
Week 13 (4/15, 17) DNS and Wechat
  1. The collateral damage of internet censorship by DNS injection (need VPN access, review + discussion, 4/15)
  2. An analysis of automatic image filtering on WeChat Moments (discussion, 4/17)
  3. (Optional) Towards a Comprehensive Picture of the Great Firewall's DNS Censorship
  4. (Optional) The Velocity of Censorship: High-Fidelity Detection of Microblog Post Deletions
  5. (Optional) One app, two systems
Week 14 (4/22, 24) Bitcoin and Tor
  1. Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System (discussion, 4/22)
  2. How the Great Firewall is Blocking Tor (review + discussion, 4/24)
  3. (Optional) Tor Bridge Discovery: Extensive Analysis and Large-scale Empirical Evaluation
  4. (Video) Tor and Circumvention: Lessons Learned, Roger Dingledine
 Slides
Week 15 (4/29, 5/1) VPN Gate, Mobile Systems, and Great Cannon
  1. VPN Gate: A Volunteer-Organized Public VPN Relay System with Blocking Resistance for Bypassing Government Censorship Firewalls (both video and pdf available, discussion, 4/29)
  2. Dissecting Android Malware: Characterization and Evolution (review + discussion, 5/1)
  3. (Optional) RAPTOR: Routing Attacks on Privacy in Tor
  4. (Optional) An Analysis of "Great Cannon"
  5. (Optional) NetCheck: Network Diagnoses from Blackbox Traces, paper, and review.

Please find my review template here.

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