Lincoln, Yvonna, and Egon Guba, "Postpositivism and the Naturalist Paradigm," pp. 14-46 in Yvonna Lincoln and Egon Guba, Naturalistic Inquiry . Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1985.*

Today’s smartphone operating systems frequently fail to provide users with visibility into how third-party applications collect and share their private data. We address these shortcomings with TaintDroid, an efficient, system-wide dynamic taint tracking and analysis system capable of simultaneously tracking multiple sources of sensitive data. TaintDroid enables realtime analysis by leveraging Android’s virtualized execution environment. TaintDroid incurs only 32p performance overhead on a CPU-bound microbenchmark and imposes negligible overhead on interactive third-party applications. Using TaintDroid to monitor the behavior of 30 popular third-party Android applications, in our 2010 study we found 20 applications potentially misused users’ private information; so did a similar fraction of the tested applications in our 2012 study. Monitoring the flow of privacy-sensitive data with TaintDroid provides valuable input for smartphone users and security service firms seeking to identify misbehaving applications.

/pdf/taintdroid-an-information-flow-tracking-system-for-realtime-5d8smsr0iy.pdf

TaintDroid: An Information-Flow Tracking System for Realtime Privacy Monitoring on Smartphones

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI): Concepts, Taxonomies, Opportunities and Challenges toward Responsible AI

National Institute of Standards and Technology における超伝導研究及び生活

Today's smartphone operating systems frequently fail to provide users with adequate control over and visibility into how third-party applications use their private data. We address these shortcomings with TaintDroid, an efficient, system-wide dynamic taint tracking and analysis system capable of simultaneously tracking multiple sources of sensitive data. TaintDroid provides realtime analysis by leveraging Android's virtualized execution environment. TaintDroid incurs only 14% performance overhead on a CPU-bound micro-benchmark and imposes negligible overhead on interactive third-party applications. Using TaintDroid to monitor the behavior of 30 popular third-party Android applications, we found 68 instances of potential misuse of users' private information across 20 applications. Monitoring sensitive data with TaintDroid provides informed use of third-party applications for phone users and valuable input for smartphone security service firms seeking to identify misbehaving applications.

/pdf/taintdroid-an-information-flow-tracking-system-for-realtime-3fnz9lwdso.pdf

TaintDroid: an information-flow tracking system for realtime privacy monitoring on smartphones

The Secure Shell (SSH) protocol is one of the most popular cryptographic protocols on the Internet. Unfortunately, the current SSH authenticated encryption mechanism is insecure. In this paper we propose several fixes to the SSH protocol and, using techniques from modern cryptography, we prove that our modified versions of SSH meet strong new chosen-ciphertext privacy and integrity requirements. Furthermore, our proposed fixes will require relatively little modification to the SSH protocol (or to SSH implementations). We believe that our new notions of privacy and integrity for encryption schemes with stateful decryption algorithms will be of independent interest.

Provably Fixing the SSH Binary Packet Protocol

Modern technologies including smartphones, AirTags, and tracking apps enable surveillance and control in interpersonal relationships. In this work, we study videos posted on TikTok that give advice for how to surveil or control others through technology, focusing on two interpersonal contexts: intimate partner relationships and parent-child relationships. We collected 98 videos across both contexts and investigate (a) what types of surveillance or control techniques the videos describe, (b) what assets are being targeted, (c) the reasons that TikTok creators give for using these techniques, and (d) defensive techniques discussed. Additionally, we make observations about how social factors – including social acceptability, gender, and TikTok culture – are critical context for the existence of this anti-privacy and anti-security advice. We discuss the use of TikTok as a rich source of qualitative data for future studies and make recommendations for technology designers around interpersonal surveillance and control.

Anti-Privacy and Anti-Security Advice on TikTok: Case Studies of Technology-Enabled Surveillance and Control in Intimate Partner and Parent-Child Relationships

This article addresses a problem with copy-protecting a large collection of electronic content. The notion and severity of a generic attack are raised in the context of Adams and Zuccherato's Privilege Management Infrastructure. A solution is then proposed that reduces a content distributor's risk of piracy.

/pdf/on-the-global-content-pmi-improved-copy-protected-internet-4z59x843gb.pdf

On the Global Content PMI: Improved Copy-Protected Internet Content Distribution

Augmented reality (AR) technologies are poised to enter the commercial mainstream. Using an interdisciplinary research team, we describe our vision of AR and explore the unique and difficult problems AR presents for law and policy — including around privacy, free speech, discrimination, and safety.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm?abstractid=2482198

Augmented Reality: Hard Problems of Law and Policy

Employers increasingly allow employees to use their personal smartphones for work, but also impose strict security policies (e.g., wiping the device after a series of failed logins), which on one hand protects the corporation’s data but on the other hand can affect a user’s privacy and control of her own data. To address these issues, recent proposals securely partition work and personal data by means of virtualization techniques. Yet, virtualization comes with limitations. First, unless heavily optimized, it has a significant overhead on resource-constrained phones. Second, it constrains all apps to be in the same partition at a time, while users like having a mix of work and personal apps running on the device simultaneously. To enable this functionality, we introduce a new point in the design space. We propose AppFork, an Android-based platform which allows users to switch a single app from one active profile (e.g., work) to another without switching the active profile of all other apps. AppFork still achieves the security of virtualization-based approaches, but with a smaller overhead. We built a tool for automatically identifying cross-profile channels in Android apps and applied it to 14,000 apps. Supported by this analysis, we craft the problem of cross-profile isolation for Android and implement our solution to it. AppFork can be used with existing unmodified apps. We evaluate it in depth with 24 Android apps. AppFork was able to successfully run all apps and provide two isolated user profiles within each app.

/pdf/per-app-profiles-with-appfork-the-security-of-two-phones-1x6kthtcvl.pdf

Tadayoshi Kohno

Papers

Provably Fixing the SSH Binary Packet Protocol

Anti-Privacy and Anti-Security Advice on TikTok: Case Studies of Technology-Enabled Surveillance and Control in Intimate Partner and Parent-Child Relationships

On the Global Content PMI: Improved Copy-Protected Internet Content Distribution

Augmented Reality: Hard Problems of Law and Policy

Per-App Profiles with AppFork: The Security of Two Phones with the Convenience of One