Category Archives: Current Events

Current event: Apple’s iPhone 3G Unlocked

Recently, an article on The Wall Street Journal describes how Apple Inc.’s iPhone 3G was unlocked by a group of independent programmers called iPhone Dev Team. Apple has partnerships with wireless networks around the world that allows iPhones to work … Continue reading

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Taking the Tweet out of Twitter

According to a recent New York Times article, the popular “micro-blogging” site, Twitter, has been the victim of a series of recent hacking and phishing attacks. The article explains that 33 member accounts, most of them belonging to big-names like … Continue reading

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Most Companies are at Risk

On Slashdot and Finance and Commerce Survey says that most of the Fortune 1,000 companies are not prepared for IT security attacks. The article suggested that companies can start monitoring the networks. If it’s too costly, outsourcing the monitoring job … Continue reading

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Intel’s “Trusted eXecution Technology” Circumvented

From an article in Infoworld via Slashdot, two researchers from Invisible Things Lab have discovered a method to circumvent Intel‘s Trusted eXecution Technology (TXT). The TXT system (PDF), part of Intel’s vPro hardware-assisted security product, is designed to allow software … Continue reading

Posted in Current Events, Research | 3 Comments

What to contribute (Winter 2009 CSE 484 / CSE M 584)

Welcome to 2009 and another rendition of CSE 484 / CSE M 584, the University of Washington undergraduate and 5-th year Masters computer security course.  Please familiarize yourself with this post from last year; it explains why we have this … Continue reading

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Pacemaker and Implantable Defibrillator Security Paper at Oakland

University of Washington CSE PhD student Dan Halperin et al.‘s paper on the security and privacy for pacemakers and implantable defibrillators just received the Best Paper Award at the annual IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (a.k.a. the “Oakland” conference). Dan and … Continue reading

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Phalanx attains Slashdot fame!

I’m not sure if many people read this blog, but I recently noticed that the UW project Phalanx (slides, paper, and poster available from Colin Dixon’s site, recently featured on Slashdot) brought up the idea of countering botnets by setting … Continue reading

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In-Flight Web Page Modifications

Our research group (Charlie Reis, Yoshi Kohno, and Steve Gribble from UW CSE, and Nick Weaver from ICSI) has just presented a measurement study showing that many users are receiving web pages that have been modified in-flight.  The pages are … Continue reading

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Microsoft, Yahoo, and Internet Breakage

In a recent interview with “Condé Nast Portfolio”, Google CEO Eric Schmidt warns us all that a Microsoft-Yahoo merger might “break the internet” due to the consolidation of web-mail, instant messaging, and other services that would follow as a result. … Continue reading

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Current Events: Wikileaks

Something that really piques one’s curiosity are the documents and reasons why governments and institutions choose to go in the paths they do.  One site that caters to uncovering these sensitive documents is Wikileaks, which has been frequently featured on … Continue reading

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