Category: Online

34C3

I’m very excited to have two talks at CCC at the end of the month. The bulk of accepted talks can be seen and voted on at the CCC “halfnarp”. The first talk is on the Internet in Cuba. It expands upon the recent talk I presented at IMC last month, to provide additional color… Continue reading 34C3

China in 2017

I had the chance to visit China last week and tag along with the tail-end of a longer trip organized around various Makerspaces around the region. This is the first time in several years that I’ve spent a prolonged amount of time in the dense population areas of Beijing and Shanghai, and it was fascinating… Continue reading China in 2017

Messaging Threat models

I talked yesterday at Bornhack about the current state of secure messaging and the different primitives and threats that groups are working to address. The talk is on youtube. The slides are on this site, as are the directions for dogfooding the talek system.

Initial Measurements of the Cuban Street Network

Internet access in Cuba is severely constrained, due to limited availability, slow speeds, and high cost. Within this isolated environment, technology enthusiasts have constructed a disconnected but vibrant IP network that has grown organically to reach tens of thousands of households across Havana. We present the first detailed characterization of this deployment, which is known… Continue reading Initial Measurements of the Cuban Street Network

IETF 98

Last week I talked briefly about the state of open internet measurement for network anomalies at IETF 98. This was my first time attending an IETF in-person meeting, and it was very useful in getting a better understanding of how to navigate the standards process, how it’s used by others, and what value can be… Continue reading IETF 98

Another Strike against Domain Fronting

In 2014, Domain Fronting became the newest obfuscation technique for covert, difficult to censor communication. Even today, the Meek Pluggable transport serves ~400GB of Tor traffic each day, at a cost of ~$3000/month. The basic technique is to make an HTTPS connection to the CDN directly, and then once the encryption has begun, make the… Continue reading Another Strike against Domain Fronting

Thoughts on Wulim

One of the exciting developments at CCC last month was a talk discussing the copy protection features in the Wulim tablet produced by the Pyongyang Information Center. This post is an attempt to reconcile the features they describe with my experience with devices around Pyongyang and provide some additional context of the environment the device… Continue reading Thoughts on Wulim