Projects and Software Releases

Active

• Mon(IoT)r Lab
  Understanding privacy, security, and bias in real Internet-of-Things deployments. (Project page)
• Broadband Connectivity for Anchor Institutions
  To access the Internet, large portions of the US population rely on anchor instituions such as schools, hospitals, libraries, and community centers. However, little is known about the quality of such Internet connections. This study aims to fill the gap.
• Harms of Online Data Collection
  Using empirical studies to understand how information is collected about consumers across a wide variety of modalities (web, mobile, IoT, connected vehicles) and then used in ways that harm consumers (e.g., surveillance pricing, changing insurance rates, general profiling/targeting).
• Wehe
  Measuring and revealing ISP's network policies, their implications for net neutrality, and their impact on applications. (Project page)
• Personal Virtual Networks
  Providing configurable security, privacy, performance---in every network you connect to as you move about the world. (Project page)

Past Projects

• Dark Patterns
  Investigating the user interface designs that trick users into giving up data, money, time, and other valuable resources. (Project page)
• Aqua, and other privacy-enhancing systems
  Practical and powerful privacy for network communication. (Project page)
• Understanding and Improving the Web's PKI (SSL/TLS)
  Measurements, analysis, and system designs to reveal how the Internet's most commonly used trust systems operate (and misfunction) in practice, and how we can make them more secure. (Project page)
• ReCon
  Automatically identifying users' personal information in network traffic and allowing them to control (change/modify) it. (Project page)
• Measurement and analysis of Internet routing
  Entails several threads that cover Internet meaasurement, modeling and experimentation. (Example publication 1, 2)
• Measuring mobile networks
  Understanding mobile Web browsers, app traffic, network infrastructure, policies and their impact on performance.
• Mobilyzer
  Crowdsourcing measurement of mobile Internet performance, now the engine for Mobiperf. (Project page, Visualization of measurements, Mobisys paper)
• Geopolitical Routing
  Understanding the geographic nature of Internet paths and their implications for performance, privacy and security. (Project page)
• Piigeon (created by Xiao (Sophia) Wang)
  Extension for Firefox that reveals Web login safety before you submit your credentials. (Project page)
• SwarmScreen
  Plugin for the Vuze (Azureus) BitTorrent client that provide downloading privacy through plausible deniability. (Project page)
• NEWS
  Plugin for the Vuze (Azureus) BitTorrent client that reliably finds problems in the network and raises alerts about them. Tens of thousands of users installed this software. (Project page)
• Ono
  Plugin for the Vuze (Azureus) BitTorrent client that uses CDN-based measurements to improve performance and reduce P2P impact on ISPs. Over 1 million users installed the plugin. (Project page)
• STRAW (STreet RAndom Waypoint)
  Vehicular mobility model implemented for the JiST/SWANS simulation platform. Currently downloaded more than 3,000 times. (Project page)
• SWANS++
  Sourceforge project that unifies updates and improvements to the JiST/SWANS simulation platform. Along with STRAW (see above), currently downloaded more than 3,000 times.(Project page)
• Ceratias
  Real-time visualization tool for the JiST/SWANS simulation platform. Also enables interaction with and online modification of the ongoing simulation, and can be detached/reattached dynamically for performance. (Part of SWANS++, see above for project page.)