Is Huawei a security threat? Seven experts weigh in
March 17, 2018 | Colin Lecher and Russell Brandom, The Verge
Press
Nicholas Weaver notes that "Sabotage can be really, really subtle. There are entire contests around how you make sabotage almost undetectable, such as the “underhanded C contest.” It is even more so in hardware. For example, you could sabotage the cryptographic random number generator so that if you knew the secret you could predict it, but if not, you can’t."
Your phone and TV are tracking you, and political campaigns are listening in
February 20, 2019 | Evan Halper, Los Angeles Times
Serge Egelman, research director of the Usable Security & Privacy Group at UC Berkeley’s International Computer Science Institute, said his team can unearth which opaque data brokerages are amassing information, but not which political campaigns or interest groups buy it from them. “There are a lot of industries buying this data for things that most people are not expecting,” Egelman said. Some might be trying to get you to purchase a Volvo, while others aim to manipulate your vote. But none disclose what they know about you and how. “That is the fundamental problem,” Egelman said. “People can’t find that out.”
18,000 Android Apps Found Violating Ad Tracking Rules
February 15, 2019 | Michael Kan, PC Mag
However, the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, California, has discovered that many popular apps are doing more than just capturing the advertising ID from Android phones. They're also collecting other identifiers, such as the device's serial number, the IMEI number, and other hardware or network indicators — none of which you can reset.
Thousands of Android apps permanently record your online activity for ad targeting
February 15, 2019 | Charlene Osborne for Zero Day
New research published by the International Computer Science Institute in California suggests that these apps are using your Advertising ID, alongside persistent identifiers which can be used for the purposes of ad personalization and targeting, in order to create fixed records of past and present user online activity without user consent.
These Android apps have been tracking you, even when you say stop
February 14, 2019 | Laura Hautala, CNET
Roughly 17,000 Android apps collect identifying information that creates a permanent record of the activity on your device, according to research from the International Computer Science Institute. The data collection appears to violate the search giant's policy on collecting data that can be used to target users for advertising in most cases, the researchers said.
Fire (and lots of it): Berkeley researcher on the only way to fix cryptocurrency
February 4, 2019 | Dan Goodin, Ars Technica
Nicholas Weaver made no bones about it: he really, really dislikes cryptocurrencies. Speaking at the Enigma security conference in Burlingame, California, last week, the researcher at UC Berkeley's International Computer Science Institute characterized bitcoin and its many follow-on digital currencies as energy-sucking leeches with no redeeming qualities.
This Time It’s Russia’s Emails Getting Leaked
January 24, 2019 | Kevin Poulsen, The Daily Beast
“A lot of what WikiLeaks will do is organize and re-publish information that’s appeared elsewhere,” said Nicholas Weaver, a researcher at the University of California at Berkeley’s International Computer Science Institute. “They’ve never done that with anything out of Russia.”
The Weather Channel Is Being Sued for Selling Your Data. How Long Before All the Other Apps Are Next?
January 10, 2019 | Sam Blum, Popular Mechanics
For Serge Egelman, a security researcher at the University of California Berkeley's International Computer Science Institute (ICSI), the underlying issue is even larger: Privacy notices across the full spectrum of apps are woefully inadequate.
When Chinese hackers declared war on the rest of us
January 10, 2019 | James Griffiths, MIT Technology Review
Weaver is a network-security expert at the International Computer Science Institute, a research center in Berkeley, California. Together with other researchers, he helped pinpoint the targets of the attack: two GitHub-hosted projects connected to GreatFire.org, a China-based anti-censorship organization.
Why some parents are banning "smart toys" this Christmas
December 22, 2018 | CBS News
Things like location data, phone numbers and contact information could be exposed, according to Serge Egelman of the International Computer Science Institute. The institute's surveillance system, under the direction of Egelman, collected evidence that is now before the Federal Trade Commission.