Anonymity and Privacy -- Spring '05

"Anonymity and Privacy" will be taught as a seminar class. Students will be expected to read a wide variety of papers; these will include technical papers, statutes, court opinions, and the like. Prerequisites include reasonable familiarity with networking and cryptography. Grading will be based on class presentations of these papers -- the exact number will depend on the total enrollment -- and on a final paper. There will be no exams.

Topics will include:

• Legal framework (US and European)
• Data mining and databases
• Anonymous commerce (digital cash)
• Anonymous use of the Internet (onion routing, anonymous browsing, P3P)
• Traffic analysis
• Biometrics and authentication
• Policy and national security considerations

Please subscribe to the class mailing list via the web at lists.cs.columbia.edu/mailman/listinfo/anon-priv

Homework assignments should be submitted by emailing them to hw-anon-priv at the obvious domain name.

Background Reading on Cryptographic Protocols

• Chapters 2-4 of Applied Cryptography, Bruce Schneier, Wiley 1996, available in the SEAS library.
• "Using encryption for authentication in large networks of computers", R. Needham and M. Schroeder, Communications of the ACM 21:12 (Dec 1978). This is the first cryptographic protocol published in the open literature (available via the CU library network).
• "Timestamps in key distribution protocols", D. Denning and G. Sacco, Communications of the ACM 24:8 (Aug 1981). A bug and a fix in the Needham-Schroeder protocol. Note: the fix is buggy, too; see if you can find the problem. There's also another bug in Needham-Schroeder that wasn't found until 1995. (available via the CU library network).

Jan 19

Introduction: What is Privacy?
Reading:
Chapter 3 of Who Goes There? Authentication Through the Lens of Privacy. Make sure you see Table 3.1; there's no link to it in the HTML version of the book.

Jan 26

Legal Foundations of Privacy
Reading:

• Katz v U.S. 389 US 347 (1967)
  Smith v Maryland 442 US 735 (1979)
• 18 USC 2510-2522, 2701-2712
• REGULATION (EC) No 45/2001 OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND OF THE COUNCIL of 18 December2000 on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data by the Community institutions and bodies and on the free movement of such data

Using some quasi-random process -- i.e., the last 4 digits of your social security number modulo 3 -- prepare one of the three sets for presentation.

Feb 2

Wiretapping
Reading:

• Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act. Note: this is necessary background for understanding the next two documents; those are the primary focus of this section.
  FCC Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on CALEA and Broadband Access and Services
  Joint Reply Comments of Industry and Public Interest Groups on CALEA Notice of Proposed Rulemaking
• Cisco Architecture for Lawful Intercept in IP Networks (RFC 3924)
• FBI Congressional Testimony on Carnivore
  Final Independent Technical Review of the Carnivore System (Executive Summary only)
  Comments on the Carnivore System Technical Review
  Carnivore FAQ (background reading)
  (Optional) Watch one-hour an FBI presentation on Carnivore to an ISP group
  (Optional) I, Cringely on CALEA

Using some quasi-random process -- i.e., the last 4 digits of your social security number modulo 3 -- prepare one of the three sets for presentation.

Note (2 March): CDT has prepared an ex parte filing on the CALEA extension NPRM.

Feb 9

The Web: Cookies
Reading:

• HTTP State Management Mechanism (RFC 2965)
  
• Doubleclick's Privacy Policy. Important -- follow the links on the left.
  EPIC Complaint Against DoubleClick
• Googe Privacy Center. (Again, follow the links on the left.)
  Orkut Privacy Policy (Orkut is affiliated with Google.)
  Amazon Privacy Policy
  A9 Privacy policy. (A9 is a subsidiary of Amazon.)

Use the usual random selection process to select a presentation topic.

The first reading item is technical background to understand the how the privacy threats are implemented. The second is a description of how Doubleclick works. Today, they have a very complete privacy policy; years ago, they were a poster child for privacy misbehavior. The third section is to analyze the privacy policies of two different pairs of major Internet sites, Google/Orkut and Amazon/A9.

Feb 16

The Web: Protecting Privacy
Reading:

• Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P) Project (CACM article)
  The Platform for Privacy Preferences 1.0 (P3P1.0) Specification (optional; skim this, and don't worry about syntactic details)
• Searching for Privacy: Design and Implementation of a P3P-Enabled Search Engine, Byers, Cranor, Kormann, McDaniel
• Crowds: Anonymity for Web Transactions, Reiter and Rubin
• Design and implementation of the Lucent Personalized Web Assistant (LPWA), Kristol, Gabber, Gibbons, Matias, and Mayer.

Use the usual random selection process to select a presentation topic. Since there are four papers this week, please adjust your timing accordingly.

There are many more links about P3P at http://www.w3.org/P3P/.

Feb 23

No office hours Feb 23

Feb 23

Database Nation
Read chapters 4, 6, and 7 of Database Nation, by Simson Garfinkel, and prepare a presentation on one of those chapters. The link to the book is via the Columbia library network; full text is available. (In fact, you may wish to read more; it's a fast read. Chapter 9 is prescient and scary --- and it was written before the terrorist attacks of 9/11.)

Mar 2

Privacy and Data Mining

• "Experimental Analysis of Privacy-Preserving Statistics Computation", Hiranmayee Subramaniam, Rebecca N. Wright, and Zhiqiang Yang, Proceedings of the Workshop on Secure Data Management (held in conjunction with VLDB'04), Springer LNCS 3178, 2004.
• "Privacy Engineering in Digital Rights Management Systems," in Proceedings of the 2001 ACM Workshop on Security and Privacy in Digital Rights Management, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 2320, Springer, Berlin, 2002, pp. 76-105. (Joan Feigenbaum, Michael Freedman, Tomas Sander, and Adam Shostack)
• Privacy-Preserving Data Mining Using Multi-Group Randomized Response Techniques". Zhijun Zhan and Wenliang Du. Technical Report, June 2003.

Use the usual random selection process to select a presentation topic.

Mar 9

Anonymous Connectivity

• Untraceable electronic mail, return addresses, and digital pseudonyms, David Chaum, CACM 24:2, February 1981.
• Tor: The Second-Generation Onion Router, Roger Dingledine, Nick Mathewson, and Paul Syverson, Proceedings of the 13th USENIX Security Symposium, August 2004.
• Universal Re-encryption for Mixnets, Philippe Golle, Markus Jakobsson, Ari Juels, Paul Syverson, The Cryptographers' Track at the RSA Conference, 2004.

For more papers, see http://www.onion-router.net/.

I assume I no longer have to say anything about how to pick a paper...

Mar 16

Spring Break

Mar 23

Side Channels

• Timing Analysis of Keystrokes and Timing Attacks on SSH. Dawn Xiaodong Song, David Wagner, and Xuqing Tian. 10th USENIX Security Symposium, 2001.
• Remote Timing Attacks are Practical. D. Boneh and D. Brumley, Proceedings of the 12th Usenix Security Symposium, 2003.
• A Technique for Counting NATted Hosts. Steven Bellovin, Proc. Second Internet Measurement Workshop, November 2002.
• Remote Physical Device Fingerprinting. Tadayoshi Kohono, Andre Broido, and KC Claffy. IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, May 8-11, 2005.

Mar 30

Traffic Analysis

• Using Signal Processing to Analyze Wireless Data Traffic, Craig Partridge, Davis Cousins, Alden Jackson, Rajesh Krishnan, Tushar Saxena, and W. Timothy Strayer. International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking, 2002.
• Low-Cost Traffic Analysis of Tor, Steven J. Murdoch and George Danezis. Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, May 2005.
• PracticalTraffic Analysis: Extending and Resisting Statistical Disclosure, Nick Mathewson and Roger Dingledine. Proceedings of Privacy Enhancing Technologies workshop (PET 2004).

April 6

Digital Cash

• Untraceable Electronic Cash. David Chaum, Amos Fiat and Moni Naor, Crypto 1988.
• VarietyCash: A Multi-purpose Electronic Payment System. M. Bellare, J. Garay, C. Jutla and M. Yung. Proceedings of the 3rd Usenix Workshop on Electronic Commerce, Usenix, 1998.
• Revokable and Versatile Electronic Money. Markus Jakobsson, Moti Yung, ACM CCS 1996.
• PayWord and MicroMint--Two Simple Micropayment Schemes. Ronald L. Rivest and Adi Shamir, Proceedings of 1996 International Workshop on Security Protocols, (ed. Mark Lomas), (Springer, 1997), Lecture Notes in Computer Science No. 1189, pages 69--87.

April 13

Key escrow and the "crypto wars"

• Cryptography's Role in Securing the Information Society, Kenneth W. Dam and Herbert S. Lin, Editors, Committee to Study National Cryptography Policy, National Research Council. Read the Executive Summary only.
  Decrypting the puzzle palace, John Perry Barlow, Communications of the ACM, Volume 35, Issue 7 (July 1992), Pages: 25-31.
• The Risks of Key Recovery, Key Escrow, and Trusted Third-Party Encryption, Hal Abelson, Ross Anderson, Steven M. Bellovin, et al., Center for Democracy and Technology, second edition, 1998.
  CERT^® Advisory CA-2000-18 PGP May Encrypt Data With Unauthorized ADKs, August 2000.
• Protocol Failure in the Escrowed Encryption Standard, M. Blaze, Proceedings of Second ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, Fairfax, VA, November 1994.

Notes on the Presentations

Apr 20

Student Presentations

Apr 27

Student Presentations

Final paper The final paper must be emailed to hw-anon-priv by 7:00 pm Wednesday, May 11. NO EXCEPTIONS