Category: Post

Made a quick survey for my HCI class this quarter to look at how people think about their privacy online.

I switched this blog’s hosting provider from dreamhost to digital ocean over the last couple days. Some features may still be glitchy for a bit longer as I finish the migration.

The benefit is that I now am on a private VM, which allows features like SSL, so https://wills.co.tt/ is now active.

Aaron made the world a better place.

I presented CalmNetViz to a bunch of students this afternoon at DawgBytes.

Will Scott

Qualifying Evaluation Project Presentation

"Block-Resistant Network Services Using Unblock"

Thursday, November 1, 2012

10:00 a.m.

Allen Center, CSE 203

Advisors:  Tom Anderson and Arvind Krishnamurthy

ABSTRACT--

The desire for uncensored access to the Internet has motivated the
development of both open proxies like Tor and social graph-based overlays
like FreeNet. However, neither design is sufficient, since open access
networks are easily exposed and blocked, and overlays based just on social
trust suffer from poor availability and performance. This talk presents
the design for a new overlay service, Unblock, constructed from an
augmented social graph. In Unblock, multi-hop paths through social links
protect individual participants from exposure to adversaries. Unblock
achieves good performance by introducing additional links in the network
graph in a manner that minimizes vulnerability. We also develop several
transport level techniques for improved latency and demonstrate the
practicality of the system for web traffic workloads.

It was a relatively easy data processing task to look at per-country disruptions in tor users. The numbers are interesting – and heartening. My previous intuition was that there was even more worldwide disruption of the network.

Data Processing Code

I’ll be giving a talk on Unblock in a week at the Department affiliates day.
Slides will be posted soon, including some cool data on recently observed censorship.

More information

I’ll be at HotNets 2012 with the FreeDOM paper I worked on this summer. Interesting stuff looking at how to support community services (like open street maps or wikipedia) online.

Conference Site

I’m TAing the undergraduate operating systems class at University of Washington this fall. It should be a cool class – the students will get to build all the cool parts of their own operating system. The assignments will get posted on the class homepage.