Once upon a time, I was on track to get a PhD in censorship/computer security. I was ABD (all but dissertation) when my advisor decided to leave and go into the private sector. When that happens… you either find a new advisor or you go with them. I decided to go with them, move to Silicon Valley, and join a startup. It was perhaps the best thing that could have happened to me. While I sometimes regret not having the extra letters after my name, I love the practicality of working in the ‘real world’. Not to mention the job prospects are better. :)

So for the most part, these posts are archival, but there are still a few gems in there.

USENIX 2013 - Day 3

2013-08-17

Today’s the third and final day. Since I had to fly out in the afternoon, I didn’t get a chance to go to as many talks today, but so it goes. There was really interesting talk that I’m sad to have missed (Dismantling Megamos Crypto: Wirelessly Lockpicking a Vehicle Immobilizer) but it’ll be nice to be home. Here are the talks that I did make it to and found particularly interesting though:

USENIX 2013 - Day 2

2013-08-16

Day 2/3. There’s really not much more to say, so how about getting right to the interesting talks:

USENIX 2013 - Day 1

2013-08-15

Perhaps unsurprisingly, there were fewer papers today that I was particularly interested–given that FOCI is directly related to my area of research. Still, computer security is a very useful field and one that I’m keen to learn more about. I only went to two of the sessions today (it’s always unfortunate when they run two interesting sessions at the same time) and here are some of the talks I found particularly interesting:

FOCI 2013

2013-08-14

Today was the Five incidents, one theme. Here are a few short summaries of the other papers that are particularly related to my own interests:

Usenix/FOCI 2013 - Five incidents, one theme: Twitter spam as a weapon to drown voices of protest

2013-08-13

Another year, another Usenix Security Symposium. Like last year, I’ll be presenting a paper at FOCI1 (Free and Open Communications on the Internet) entitled: Five incidents, one theme: Twitter spam as a weapon to drown voices of protest: Social networking sites, such as Twitter and Facebook, have become an impressive force in the modern world with user bases larger than many individual countries. With such influence, they have become important in the process of worldwide politics.

ISMA 2013 AIMS-5 - DNS Based Censorship

2013-02-09

I gave a presentation about research that I’m just starting out studying DNS-based censorship in specific around the world. In particularly, preliminary findings in China have confirmed that the Great Firewall is responding via packet injection to many queries for either Facebook or Twitter (among others). Interestingly, the pool of IPs that they return is consistent yet none of the IPs seem to resolve to anything interesting. In addition, there is fallout in South Korea where some percentage of packets go through China and thus have the same behaviors.

AIMS-5 - Day 3

2013-02-09

Yesterday was the third and final day of AIMS-5. With the main topic being Detection of Censorship, Filtering, and Outages, many of these talks were much more in line with what I know and what I’m working on. I gave my presentation as well, you can see it (along with a link to my slides) down below.

AIMS-5 - Day 2

2013-02-08

Today’s agenda had discussions on Mobile Measurements and IPv6 Annotations, none of which are areas that I find myself particularly interested in. Still, I did learn a few things.

AIMS-5 - Workshop on Active Internet Measurements

2013-02-07

Yesterday was the first of three days for the fifth annual ISC/CAIDA Workshop I went to in Baltimore back in October at least, but even the ones that weren’t have still been interesting.

I’ll be presenting on Friday and I’ll share my slides when I get that far (they aren’t actually finished yet). I’ll be talking about new work that I’m just getting off the ground focusing specifically on DNS-based censorship. There is a lot of interesting ground to cover there and this should be only the first in a series of updates about that work (I hope).

Scanning for DNS resolvers

2013-01-31

For a research project I’m working on, it has become necessary to scan potentially large IPv4 prefixes in order to find any DNS revolvers that I can and classify them as either open (accepting queries from anyone) or closed.

Disclaimer: This is a form of port scanning and thus has associated ethical and legal considerations. Use it at your own risk.

This project is available on GitHub: jpverkamp/dnsscan