I’m getting back this week after spending most of the last month Bicycling from Pakistan to China on the Karakoram highway. It was a great trip, full of friendly people, breathtaking mountains, and delicious food.
Category: Post
Watch your PAC
In the last week at Blackhat / Defcon two groups looked deeply at one of the lesser known implementations of network policy called Proxy Autoconfig. (In particular, badWPAD by Maxim and Crippling HTTPS with unholy PAC by Safebreach.) Proxy AutoConfig (PAC) is a mechanism used by many organizations to configure an advanced policy for connecting… Continue reading Watch your PAC
Stunning
I’ve started to dive once again into the mess of connection establishment. Network address translation (NAT) is a reality today for most Internet users, and poses a significant hurdle in creating the user-user (or peer-peer) connections. NAT is the process used by your router to provide multiple internal (192.168.x.x) addresses that are all only visible… Continue reading Stunning
Another year, another dive into what’s changed in running a web server. This VM is now basically up-to-date, and supports most of the shiny new web transport improvements, like HTTP/2 and OCSP stapling. Hopefully nothing broke too badly in the process.
Excited to see Satellite chosen as best student paper this year at USENIX ATC. Slides and audio from the talk should be online shortly.
The CS department, as always, is on top of its news releases.
Graduation
I was fortunate enough to graduate from the University of Washington’s Computer Science and Engineering PhD program this spring. It has been an amazing five years, due in large part to an amazing group of colleagues.
Satellite
I’m excited to present Satellite, a network measurement project I’ve been working on over the last couple years, at USENIX ATC next month. Satellite takes a look at understanding shared CDN behaviors and automatically detecting censorship by regularly querying open DNS resolvers around the world. For example, we can watch the trends in censorship in… Continue reading Satellite
New Hopes for a Changing World
I’ve been reading through Bertrand Russell recently, and found one particularly resonant thought in his discussion on creed. Prosperity is generally admitted in the West to be the best preventive of Communist fanaticism, but no one seems to draw the conclusion that it would be a good thing if Russia were prosperous. Trade across the… Continue reading New Hopes for a Changing World
Contextualizing RedStar OS
At the 2015 Chaos Communication Congress, Florian and Niklaus presented an analysis of Red Star OS 3.0, the system which leaked online a year ago. In their talk they provide technical backing for several observations about the system which have gained some press attention. The first is that the Operating System is designed without obvious… Continue reading Contextualizing RedStar OS
SP3
I started running a public sp3 server today. It’s a small side-project I’ve hacked together over the last couple weeks to make it easier for people to play with packet spoofing. The server works similarly to a public proxy, but with the trade-off that while it won’t send high-volumes of traffic, it will allow you… Continue reading SP3