FairSwap: how to fairly exchange digital goods

FairSwap: how to fairly exchange digital goods Dziembowski et al., CCS’18

(Preprint)

This is a transactions paper with a twist. The transactions we’re talking about are purchases of digital assets. More specifically, the purchase of a file (document, movie, archive of a dataset, …). The property we strongly care about is atomicity: either the seller receives payment and the buyer receives a valid file or neither of these things happen. The buyer and seller don’t trust each other (so e.g., “you send me the payment and then I’ll send you the file” is not an acceptable solution, nor is “you send me the file and then I’ll send you the payment”). This is known as the fair exchange problem.

Fair exchange is a well studied research problem. It has been shown that without further assumptions fair exchange cannot be achieved without a Trusted Third Party (TTP). To circumvent this impossibility, research has studied weaker security models— most notably, the optimistic model in which a TTP is consulted only in case one party deviates from the expected behavior.

In many real-world scenarios, escrow services play the role of the trusted third party. Unfortunately this means you Continue reading

December 4 – NRE Labs Outage Post-Mortem

I awoke yesterday to a very crisp Tuesday morning in Portland, Oregon. I had just poured myself a nice glass of Stumptown Nitro cold brew coffee, and wandered upstairs to my office for an 8AM conference call. I joined the meeting, and started going through my usual routine - part of which includes looking at the day’s NRE Labs stats. Here’s what I saw: Well, that kind of sucks.

December 4 – NRE Labs Outage Post-Mortem

I awoke yesterday to a very crisp Tuesday morning in Portland, Oregon. I had just poured myself a nice glass of Stumptown Nitro cold brew coffee, and wandered upstairs to my office for an 8AM conference call. I joined the meeting, and started going through my usual routine - part of which includes looking at the day’s NRE Labs stats. Here’s what I saw: Well, that kind of sucks.

December 4 – NRE Labs Outage Post-Mortem

I awoke yesterday to a very crisp Tuesday morning in Portland, Oregon. I had just poured myself a nice glass of Stumptown Nitro cold brew coffee, and wandered upstairs to my office for an 8AM conference call. I joined the meeting, and started going through my usual routine - part of which includes looking at the day’s NRE Labs stats. Here’s what I saw: Well, that kind of sucks.

The Benin Chapter Wins Chapterthon 2018

The winner of this year’s Chapterthon was announced this Tuesday, 4 December during InterCommunity 2018.

Chapterthon is a global Internet Society (ISOC) Chapters and Special Interest Groups (SIGs) marathon, where all the Internet Society members can participate by developing a project within a timeline and budget to achieve a common goal. The project winner is selected by the community through online vote.

This year our community worked on the Internet of Things (IoT) – The future is ours to shape.

Every year, the Chapterthon brings enthusiasm and excitement amongst our community. During two and half months, 43 Chapters and Special Interest Groups (SIGs) from across the globe worked alongside to bring awareness on the Internet of Things (IoT) to their communities. They ran over 200 training sessions and workshops, engaging students, entrepreneurs, and local governments. They organized national campaigns, their projects were mentioned in local newspapers, and their message was brought to the most remote places. The Chapters also developed IoT applications that may in the future improve the lives of people in their communities, and amongst some of the projects are improved transport systems, agriculture, energy management, home protection, and healthcare.

The projects that received the highest number Continue reading

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EU Terrorist Content Online proposal – political haste and unintended consequences

EU Terrorist Content Online proposal – political haste and unintended consequences
Photo by Sara Kurfeß / Unsplash
EU Terrorist Content Online proposal – political haste and unintended consequences

In September, the European Commission presented a legislative proposal to address the removal of terrorist content online. There has been significant political pressure, particularly as the EU elections of 2019 approach, towards internet companies taking on increased responsibility in the area of terrorist propaganda online. This proposal would be a marked move from various voluntary initiatives taken up by some social media companies in recent times towards a legal responsibility framework for many.  

While appreciating the concerns around terrorism, Cloudflare is not only troubled by the late presentation of this proposal – which leaves inadequate time for a thorough review before this EU legislative term expires – but also much of the substance. Along with others such as CDT, GSMA/ETNO and Mozilla, we have significant concerns around the legal implications, practical application and possible unintended consequences of the proposal, some of which we outline below. Furthermore, we believe that little evidence has been presented as to the necessity of the proposed measures.

Concerns and shortcomings

The Commission’s proposal does not account for the complexity and range of information society services having a storage component - not all services have the same Continue reading

BrandPost: Opportunistic Wireless Encryption…Um, What’s That Again?

By now you’ve heard countless stories for how insecure public Wi-Fi networks in coffee shops, bars, and large venues can be too dangerous for users – malware can infect personal devices, hackers can acquire usernames and passwords, and ransomware can hold private data hostage.In places like airports, potentially millions of travelers are at risk to these types of cyberattacks because of open networks. According to an assessment by Coronet in a CNBC article, you can put a stop to these problems by not joining an open, public Wi-Fi network at all – or if you do, update your device software and use different passwords for different accounts in the event you do get hacked.To read this article in full, please click here

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