Events Calendar

CS Colloquium: Jason Polakis (Columbia U.) -Protecting Users in the Age of the Social Web

Speaker: Jason Polakis, Columbia University

Talk Title: Protecting Users in the Age of the Social Web

Series: CS Colloquium

Abstract: This lecture satisfies requirements for CSCI 591: Computer Science Research Colloquium

In this talk I will focus on my research efforts to better understand and protect against such loss. I will start with a focused review on the importance of online privacy, and highlight the privacy risks of location proximity, which has been adopted by major web services and mobile apps. This work demonstrated novel threats that can neutralize existing countermeasures used by the industry and pinpoint a user's location with high accuracy within seconds. To protect users, I developed a practical defense in the form of privacy-preserving proximity that obfuscates the user's location, which has been adopted by Facebook and Foursquare. I will demonstrate how user privacy also affects security mechanisms, and present my analysis of the threat surface of Facebook's social authentication system. I will then present a novel social authentication system that is robust against advanced targeted attacks and prevents adversaries from compromising user accounts, and conclude by sharing my thoughts for future directions.

This lecture will be available to stream HERE.

Biography: Jason Polakis is a postdoctoral research scientist at Columbia University. He earned his PhD in 2014 from the Computer Science Department of the University of Crete, Greece, where he was supported by the Foundation of Research and Technology Hellas (FORTH). He is broadly interested in identifying the security and privacy limitations of Internet technologies, designing robust defenses and privacy-preserving techniques, and enhancing our understanding of the online ecosystem and its threats. His research has revealed significant flaws in popular services, and major vendors such as Google, Facebook and Foursquare have deployed his proposed defenses. His work has been published in top tier security conferences (Security and Privacy, CCS, and NDSS) as well as other top tier computer science conferences (WWW).

Host: CS Department

More Info: https://bluejeans.com/313531059

Location: Henry Salvatori Computer Science Center (SAL) - 101

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Assistant to CS chair

Event Link: https://bluejeans.com/313531059