Our paper on "Hammurabi: A Framework for Pluggable, Logic-based X.509 Certificate Validation Policies" received a Best Paper Honorable Mention from ACM CCS 2022! Congrats to my coauthors, including the five Breakerspace undergraduate researchers!

Rising junior Frederick Sell presented our paper "GET /out: Automated Discovery of Application-Layer Censorship Evasion Strategies" at USENIX Security 2022. See the talk video here.

Our paper on "Weaponizing Middleboxes for Reflected TCP Amplification" received an Internet Defense Prize! Thank you to USENIX and Facebook for this award.

Our paper on "Weaponizing Middleboxes for Reflected TCP Amplification" was recognized with a Distinguished Paper Award at USENIX Security 2021! Congrats to Breakerspace students Kevin Bock, Yair Fax, and Kyle Hurley!

Congrats to Kevin Bock on a great (live!) presentation of his and other Breakerspace students' work at WOOT 2021 demonstrating that censorship infrastructure can be weaponized to launch availability attacks. Congrats Kevin, Pranav Bharadwaj, and Jasraj Singh.

Our paper on Bento, an architecture for a more programmable Tor, has been accepted to ACM SIGCOMM 2021. A huge congrats to Michael Reininger, Nick Francino, Stephen Herwig, and our collaborators from Purdue!

Our paper on server-side censorship evasion has received an IRTF Applied Networking Research Prize! Congratulations to lead author Kevin Bock and the five undergrads (at the time) George Hughey, Louis-Henri Merino, Tania Arya, Daniel Liscinsky, and Regina Pogosian!

It has long been assumed that there are no nontrivial reflected amplification attacks using TCP—prior attacks are UDP or simply TCP SYNs. In our forthcoming USENIX Security 2021 paper, we apply a genetic algorithm to discover 5 reflected TCP amplification attacks + variants. Congrats to Breakerspace students Kevin Bock, Yair Fax, and Kyle Hurley, and our collaborators from UC Boulder, Abdulrahman Alaraj and Eric Wustrow!

Congrats to Richard Roberts, Daniela Lulli, Abolee Raut, and Kelsey Fulton for their work on "Mental Models of Domain Names and URLs" being accepted as a poster to SOUPS 2020 (Symposium On Usable Privacy and Security)! This work involves performing user interviews to understand their (mis)conceptions about domain names, and why they fall for things like irs.gov-login.pw (don't worry, that's our project website!).

Our work on "Detecting and Evading Censorship-in-Depth: A Case Study of Iran's Protocol Whitelister" has been accepted to the USENIX Workshop on Free and Open Communications on the Internet (FOCI 2020)! This paper explores what we call "censorship-in-depth": when nation-states use multiple, concurrent forms of censorship to thwart communication. We apply our tool Geneva to understand it and circumvent it in Iran. More information here. Congrats Kevin Bock, Yair Fax, Kyle Reese, and Jasraj Singh!

Breakerspace just got its first paper accepted to ACM SIGCOMM! The paper presents the first techniques to circumvent nation-state censorship without requiring clients to download anything (it's all server-side). This will help users evade censorship, even if they don't know they're being censored. Congrats to Breakerspace students Kevin Bock, George Hughey, Louis-Henri Merino, Tania Arya, Daniel Liscinsky, and Regina Pogosian!

Louis-Henri Merino has accepted an offer to join the PhD program at EPFL in Switzerland, to be advised by Bryan Ford. Congratulations, Louis-Henri!

Kevin Bock and George Hughey presented their work on automatically evading nation-state censorship with Geneva at the Bluehat IL 2020 conference.

Two papers with Breakerspace undergraduate authors have been accepted to ACM CCS 2019! Congrats to Kevin Bock, Yaelle Goldschlag, George Hughey, Richard Roberts, and Rachel Walter!

Breakerspace student Yaelle Goldschlag has received a Goldwater Scholarship. Congratulations, Yaelle!

Breakerspace student George Hughey's honors thesis on unCaptcha has been selected to win a Winston Family Honors Thesis Award. Congratulations, George!

Breakerspace student Louis-Henri Merino was awarded a Fulbright US Research Grant to study in Switzerland at EPFL with Bryan Ford! Congratulations, Louis-Henri! (story)

Kevin Bock and George Hughey presented their work on automatically evading nation-state censorship with Geneva at the Bluehat IL 2020 conference.

Two papers with Breakerspace undergraduate authors have been accepted to ACM CCS 2019! Congrats to Kevin Bock, Yaelle Goldschlag, George Hughey, Richard Roberts, and Rachel Walter!

Breakerspace student Yaelle Goldschlag has received a Goldwater Scholarship. Congratulations, Yaelle!

Breakerspace student George Hughey's honors thesis on unCaptcha has been selected to win a Winston Family Honors Thesis Award. Congratulations, George!

Breakerspace student Louis-Henri Merino was awarded a Fulbright US Research Grant to study in Switzerland at EPFL with Bryan Ford! Congratulations, Louis-Henri! (story)

Breakerspace students' study into whether or not home Internet-of-Things devices are safely collecting and transmitting data (they're not) was featured in a WUSA9 article.

Google's reCaptcha (v2) is broken again. As a follow-on work to our WOOT'17 unCaptcha paper, George Hughey broke the updated reCaptcha with even higher accuracy. (unCaptcha v2 code | Project page)

George Hughey's paper on measuring and analyzing Hajime, a peer-to-peer IoT Botnet, has been accepted to NDSS 2019. This is joint work with graduate students Stephen Herwig, Katura Harvey, and Richard Roberts. Congrats all!

Breakerspace students took first place at patriotCTF. Congrats to George, Josh, Michael, and Peter!

Three posters from Breakerspace students have been accepted to the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC) poster session. Congrats to George, Rachel, and Yaelle!

Kevin Bock presented a talk at USENIX HotSec'18 explaining that mobile apps fail to check for certificate revocations.

Kevin Bock and George Hughey's paper about a novel security competition, "King of the Hill," was accepted to ASE 2018. Congrats!