Anti-social behavior such as flaming and griefing is pervasive and problematic in many online venues. This behavior breaks established norms and unsettles the well-being and development of online communities. In a popular online game, Riot Games's League of Legends, the game company received tens of thousands of complaints about others every day. To regulate what they call "toxic" behavior, Riot devised the "Tribunal" system as a way of letting the community to police itself. The Tribunal is a crowdsoucing system that empowers players to identify and judge misbehavior.
When a live site is down or time is of the essence, software teams mobilize to fix bugs as fast as possible. How might such important bugs be fixed more quickly? One answer is through crowdsourcing, where ad-hoc participants are each given small, self-contained microtasks that are then aggregated into an overall solution. To explore this idea, we are currently designing new techniques and tools for crowd debugging.
In the era of big data and personalization, websites and (mobile) applications collect an increasingly large amount of personal information about their users. The large majority of users decide to disclose some but not all information that is requested from them. They trade off the anticipated benefits with the privacy risks of disclosure, a decision process that has been dubbed privacy calculus. Such decisions are inherently difficult though, because they may have uncertain repercussions later on that are difficult to weigh against the (possibly immediate) gratification of disclosure. How can we help users to balance the benefits and risks of information disclosure in a user-friendly manner, so that they can make good privacy decisions?
COVERT is a tool for compositional verification of Android inter-application vulnerabilities. It automatically identifies vulnerabilities that occur due to the interaction of apps comprising a system. Subsequently, it determines whether it is safe for a bundle of apps, requiring certain permissions and potentially interacting with each other, to be installed together.
The current security mechanisms for Android apps, both static and dynamic analysis approaches, are insufficient for detection and prevention of the increasingly dynamic and sophisticated security attacks.
Android is the dominant mobile platform with 85% market share, as of the first quarter of 2017. At the same time, the number and sophistication of malicious Android apps are increasin.
Bitcoin is a digital currency and payment platform that has been the source of much media attention. The currency is not backed by a government like most conventional currencies but is part of a democratic and dencentralized movement. Bitcoin transactions are pseudo-anonymous in a similar way to cash money. Why do people use this currency? How do their political values align with their usage of bitcoin? Furthermore, how does the community regulate itself in the absence of a formal hierarchical structure? Lastly, how do anonymous users form communities?