Category Archives: Academic papers

2020 Caspar Bowden Award

Academic papers, Awards, Privacy technology

You are invited to submit nominations for the 2020 Caspar Bowden Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies. The Caspar Bowden PET award is presented annually to researchers who have made an outstanding contribution to the theory, design, implementation, or deployment of privacy enhancing technology. It is awarded at the annual Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS), and carries a cash prize as well as a physical award monument.

Any paper by any author written in the area of privacy enhancing technologies is eligible for nomination. However, the paper must have appeared in a refereed journal, conference, or workshop with proceedings published in the period from April 1, 2018 until March 31, 2020.

Note that we do not accept nominations for publications in conference proceedings when the dates of the conference fall outside of the nomination window. For example, a IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (“Oakland”) paper made available on IEEE Xplore prior to the March 31 deadline would not be eligible, as the conference happens in May. Please note that PETS is associated with a journal publication, PoPETs, so any PoPETs paper published in an issue appearing before the March 31 deadline is eligible (which typically means only Issue 1 of the current year).

Anyone can nominate a paper by sending an email message to award-chairs20@petsymposium.org containing the following:
. Paper title
. Author(s)
. Author(s) contact information
. Publication venue and full reference
. Link to an available online version of the paper
. A nomination statement of no more than 500 words.

All nominations must be submitted by April 5, 2020. The award committee will select one or two winners among the nominations received. Winners must be present at the PET Symposium in order to receive the Award. This requirement can be waived only at the discretion of the PET advisory board. The complete Award rules including eligibility requirements can be found here.

Caspar Bowden PET Award Chairs (award-chairs20@petsymposium.org)

Simone Fischer-Hübner, Karlstad University
Ross Anderson, University of Cambridge

Caspar Bowden PET Award Committee

Erman Ayday, Bilkent University
Nataliia Bielova, Inria
Sonja Buchegger, KTH
Ian Goldberg, University of Waterloo
Rachel Greenstadt, NYU
Marit Hansen, Unabhängiges Datenschutzzentrum Schleswig Holstein -ULD
Dali Kaafar, CSIRO
Eran Toch, Tel Aviv University
Carmela Troncoso, EPFL
Matthew Wright, Rochester Institute of Technology

More information about the Caspar Bowden PET award (including past winners) is available here.

APWG eCrime 2019

Academic papers, Awards, Cybercrime

Last week the APWG Symposium on Electronic Crime Research was held at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. The Cambridge Cybercrime Centre was very well-represented at the symposium. Of the 12 accepted research papers, five were authored or co-authored by scholars from the Centre. The topics of the research papers addressed a wide range of cybercrime issues, ranging from honeypots to gaming as pathways to cybercrime. One of the papers with a Cambridge author, “Identifying Unintended Harms of Cybersecurity Countermeasures”, received the Best Paper award. The Honorable Mention award went to “Mapping the Underground: Supervised Discovery of Cybercrime Supply Chains”, which was a collaboration between NYU, ICSI and the Centre.

In this post, we will provide a brief description for each paper in this post. The final versions aren’t yet available, we will blog them in more detail as they appear.

Best Paper

Identifying Unintended Harms of Cybersecurity Countermeasures

Yi Ting Chua, Simon Parkin, Matthew Edwards, Daniela Oliveira, Stefan Schiffner, Gareth Tyson, and Alice Hutchings

In this paper, the authors consider that well-intentioned cybersecurity risk management activities can create not only unintended consequences, but also unintended harms to user behaviours, system users, or the infrastructure itself. Through reviewing countermeasures and associated unintended harms for five cyber deception and aggression scenarios (including tech-abuse, disinformation campaigns, and dating fraud), the authors identified categorizations of unintended harms. These categories were further developed into a framework of questions to prompt risk managers to consider harms in a structured manner, and introduce the discussion of vulnerable groups across all harms. The authors envision that this framework can act as a common-ground and a tool bringing together stakeholders towards a coordinated approach to cybersecurity risk management in a complex, multi-party service and/or technology ecosystem.

Honorable Mention

Mapping the Underground: Supervised Discovery of Cybercrime Supply Chains

Rasika Bhalerao, Maxwell Aliapoulios, Ilia Shumailov, Sadia Afroz, and Damon McCoy

Cybercrime forums enable modern criminal entrepreneurs to collaborate with other criminals into increasingly efficient and sophisticated criminal endeavors.
Understanding the connections between different products and services is currently very expensive and requires a lot of time-consuming manual effort. In this paper, we propose a language-agnostic method to automatically extract supply chains from cybercrime forum posts and replies. Our analysis of generated supply chains highlights unique differences in the lifecycle of products and services on offer in Russian and English cybercrime forums.

Honware: A Virtual Honeypot Framework for Capturing CPE and IoT Zero Day

Alexander Vetterl and Richard Clayton

We presented honware, a new honeypot framework which can rapidly emulate a wide range of CPE and IoT devices without any access to the manufacturers’ hardware.

The framework processes a standard firmware image and will help to detect real attacks and associated vulnerabilities that might otherwise be exploited for considerable periods of time without anyone noticing.

From Playing Games to Committing Crimes: A Multi-Technique Approach to Predicting Key Actors on an Online Gaming Forum

Jack Hughes , Ben Collier, and Alice Hutchings

This paper proposes a systematic framework for analysing forum datasets, which contain minimal structure and are non-trivial to analyse at scale. The paper takes a multi-technique approach drawing on a combination of features relating to content and metadata, to predict potential key actors. From these predictions and trained models, the paper begins to look at characteristics of the group of potential key actors, which may benefit more from targeted intervention activities.

Fighting the “Blackheart Airports”: Internal Policing in the Chinese Censorship Circumvention Ecosystem

Yi Ting Chua and Ben Collier

In this paper, the authors provide an overview of the self-policing mechanisms present in the ecosystem of services used in China to circumvent online censorship. We conducted an in-depth netnographic study of four Telegram channels which were used to co-ordinate various kinds of attacks on groups and individuals offering fake or scam services. More specifically, these actors utilized cybercrime tools such as denial of service attack and doxxing to punish scammers. The motivations behind this self-policing appear to be genuinely altruistic, with individuals largely concerned with maintaining a stable ecosystem of services to allow Chinese citizens to bypass the Great Firewall. Although this is an emerging phenomenon, it appears to be developing into an important and novel kind of trust mechanism within this market

Online suicide games: a form of digital self-harm or a myth?

Academic papers, ,

By Maria Bada & Richard Clayton

October is ‘Cyber Security Month’, and you will see lots of warnings and advice about how to keep yourself safe online. Unfortunately, not every warning is entirely accurate and particularly egregious examples are warnings about ‘suicide games’ which are said to involve an escalating series of challenges ending in suicide.

Here at the Cambridge Cybercrime Centre, we’ve been looking into suicide games by interviewing teachers, child protection experts and NGOs; and by tracking mentions of games such as the ‘Blue Whale Challenge’ and ‘Momo’ in news stories and on UK Police and related websites.

We found that the stories about online suicide games have no discernable basis in fact and are linked to misperceptions about actual suicides. A key finding of our work is that media, social media and well-meaning (but baseless) warning releases by authorities are spreading the challenge culture and exaggerating fears.

To clarify, virally spreading challenges are real and some are unexpectedly dangerous such as the salt and ice challenge, the cinnamon challenge and more recently skin embroidery. Very sadly of course suicides are also real – but we are convinced that the combination has no basis in fact.

We’re not alone in our belief. Snopes investigated Blue Whale in 2017 and deemed the story ‘unproven’, while in 2019 the BBC posted a detailed history of Blue Whale showing there was no record of such a game prior to a single Russian media article of dubious accuracy. The UK Safer Internet Centre calls the claims around Momo ‘fake news’, while YouTube has found no evidence to support the claim that there are videos showing or promoting Momo on its platform.

Regardless of whether a challenge is dangerous or not, youngsters are especially motivated to take part, presumably because of a desire for attention and curiosity. The ‘challenge culture’ is a deeply rooted online phenomenon. Young people are constantly receiving media messages and new norms which not only inform their thinking, but also their values and beliefs. 

Although there is no evidence that the suicide games are ‘real’, authorities around the world have reacted by releasing warnings and creating information campaigns to warn youngsters and parents about the risks. However, a key concern when discussing, or warning of, suicide games is that this drives children towards the very content of concern and raises the risk of ‘suicide contagion’, which could turn stories into a tragic self-fulfilling prophecy for a small number of vulnerable youths.

Understanding what media content really means, what its source is and why a certain message has been constructed, is crucial for quality understanding and recognition of media mediated messages and their meaning. Adequate answers to all these questions can only be acquired by media literacy. However, in most countries media education is still a secondary activity that teachers or media educators deal with without training or proper material. 

Our research recommends that policy measures are taken such as: a) awareness and education to ensure that young people can handle risks online and offline; b) development of national and international strategies and guidelines for suicide prevention and how the news related to suicides is shown in media and social media; c) development of social media and media literacy; d) collaborative efforts of media, legal systems and education to prevent suicides; e) guidance for quality control of warning releases by authorities.

Maria Bada presented this work on 24-26th June 2019, at the 24th Annual CyberPsychology, CyberTherapy & Social Networking Conference (CYPSY24) in Norfolk, Virginia, USA. Click here  to access the abstract of this paper – the full version of the paper is currently in peer review and should be available soon.

Usability of Cybercrime Datasets

Academic papers, Cybercrime

By Ildiko Pete and Yi Ting Chua

The availability of publicly accessible datasets plays an essential role in the advancement of cybercrime and cybersecurity as a field. There has been increasing effort to understand how datasets are created, classified, shared, and used by scholars. However, there has been very few studies that address the usability of datasets. 

As part of an ongoing project to improve the accessibility of cybersecurity and cybercrime datasets, we conducted a case study that examined and assessed the datasets offered by the Cambridge Cybercrime Centre (CCC). We examined two stages of the data sharing process: dataset sharing and dataset usage. Dataset sharing refers to three steps: (1) informing potential users of available datasets, (2) providing instructions on application process, and (3) granting access to users. Dataset usage refers to the process of querying, manipulation and extracting data from the dataset. We were interested in assessing users’ experiences with the data sharing process and discovering challenges and difficulties when using any of the offered datasets. 

To this end, we reached out to 65 individuals who applied for access to the CCC’s datasets and are potentially actively using the datasets. The survey questionnaire was administered via Qualtrics. We received sixteen responses, nine of which were fully completed. The responses to open-ended questions were transcribed, and then we performed thematic analysis.

As a result, we discovered two main themes. The first theme is users’ level of technological competence, and the second one is users’ experiences. The findings revealed generally positive user experiences with the CCC’s data sharing process and users reported no major obstacles with regards to the dataset sharing stage. Most participants have accessed and used the CrimeBB dataset, which contains more than 48 million posts. Users also expressed that they are likely to recommend the dataset to other researchers. During the dataset usage phase, users reported some technical difficulties. Interestingly, these technical issues were specific, such as version conflicts. This highlights that users with a higher level of technical skills also experience technical difficulties, however these are of different nature in contrast to generic technical challenges. Nonetheless, the survey shown the CCC’s success in sharing their datasets to a sub-set of cybercrime and cybersecurity researchers approached in the current study. 

Ildiko Pete presented the preliminary findings on 12thAugust at CSET’19. Click here to access the full paper. 

SHB 2019 – Liveblog

Academic papers, Legal issues, Privacy technology, Security economics, Security psychology, Social networks

I’ll be trying to liveblog the twelfth workshop on security and human behaviour at Harvard. I’m doing this remotely because of US visa issues, as I did for WEIS 2019 over the last couple of days. Ben Collier is attending as my proxy and we’re trying to build on the experience of telepresence reported here and here. My summaries of the workshop sessions will appear as followups to this post.

WEIS 2019 – Liveblog

Academic papers, Cybercrime, Legal issues, Politics, Security economics, Security psychology

I’ll be trying to liveblog the seventeenth workshop on the economics of information security at Harvard. I’m not in Cambridge, Massachussetts, but in Cambridge, England, because of a visa held in ‘administrative processing’ (a fate that has befallen several other cryptographers). My postdoc Ben Collier is attending as my proxy (inspired by this and this).

The Changing Cost of Cybercrime

Academic papers, Banking security, Cybercrime, Legal issues, Politics, Security economics

In 2012 we presented the first systematic study of the costs of cybercrime. We have now repeated our study, to work out what’s changed in the seven years since then.

Measuring the Changing Cost of Cybercrime will appear on Monday at WEIS. The period has seen huge changes, with the smartphone replacing as PC and laptop as the consumer terminal of choice, with Android replacing Windows as the most popular operating system, and many services moving to the cloud. Yet the overall pattern of cybercrime is much the same.

We know a lot more than we did then. Back in 2012, we guessed that cybercrime was about half of all crime, by volume and value; we now know from surveys in several countries that this is the case. Payment fraud has doubled, but fallen slightly as a proportion of payment value; the payment system has got larger, and slightly more efficient.

So what’s changed? New cybercrimes include ransomware and other offences related to cryptocurrencies; travel fraud has also grown. Business email compromise and its cousin, authorised push payment fraud, are also growth areas. We’ve also seen serious collateral damage from cyber-weapons such as the NotPetya worm. The good news is that crimes that infringe intellectual property – from patent-infringing pharmaceuticals to copyright-infringing software, music and video – are down.

Our conclusions are much the same as in 2012. Most cyber-criminals operate with impunity, and we have to fix this. We need to put a lot more effort into catching and punishing the perpetrators.

Our new paper is here. For comparison the 2012 paper is here, while a separate study on the emotional cost of cybercrime is here.

Calibration Fingerprint Attacks for Smartphones

Academic papers, Privacy technology, Web security,

When you visit a website, your web browser provides a range of information to the website, including the name and version of your browser, screen size, fonts installed, and so on. Website authors can use this information to provide an improved user experience. Unfortunately this same information can also be used to track you. In particular, this information can be used to generate a distinctive signature, or device fingerprint, to identify you.

A device fingerprint allows websites to detect your return visits or track you as you browse from one website to the next across the Internet. Such techniques can be used to protect against identity theft or credit card fraud, but also allow advertisers to monitor your activities and build a user profile of the websites you visit (and therefore a view into your personal interests). Browser vendors have long worried about the potential privacy invasion from device fingerprinting and have included measures to prevent such tracking. For example, on iOS, the Mobile Safari browser uses Intelligent Tracking Prevention to restrict the use of cookies, prevent access to unique device settings, and eliminate cross-domain tracking.

We have developed a new type of fingerprinting attack, the calibration fingerprinting attack. Our attack uses data gathered from the accelerometer, gyroscope and magnetometer sensors found in smartphones to construct a globally unique fingerprint. Our attack can be launched by any website you visit or any app you use on a vulnerable device without requiring any explicit confirmation or consent from you. The attack takes less than one second to generate a fingerprint which never changes, even after a factory reset. This attack therefore provides an effective means to track you as you browse across the web and move between apps on your phone.

One-minute video providing a demo and describing how the attack works

Our approach works by carefully analysing the data from sensors which are accessible without any special permissions on both websites and apps. Our analysis infers the per-device factory calibration data which manufacturers embed into the firmware of the smartphone to compensate for systematic manufacturing errors. This calibration data can then be used as the fingerprint.

In general, it is difficult to create a unique fingerprint on iOS devices due to strict sandboxing and device homogeneity. However, we demonstrated that our approach can produce globally unique fingerprints for iOS devices from an installed app: around 67 bits of entropy for the iPhone 6S. Calibration fingerprints generated by a website are less unique (around 42 bits of entropy for the iPhone 6S), but they are orthogonal to existing fingerprinting techniques and together they are likely to form a globally unique fingerprint for iOS devices. Apple adopted our proposed mitigations in iOS 12.2 for apps (CVE-2019-8541). Apple recently removed all access to motion sensors from Mobile Safari by default.

We presented this work on 21st May at IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy 2019. For more details, please visit the SensorID website and read our paper:

Jiexin Zhang, Alastair R. Beresford and Ian Sheret, SensorID: Sensor Calibration Fingerprinting for Smartphones, Proceedings of the 40th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P), 2019.