Tag Archive for: Congressman

Congressman Cohen Announces Internet Privacy Research Grant to the University of Memphis

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Work on encrypted data over wide-area networks supported by the National Science Foundation

MEMPHIS – Congressman Steve Cohen (TN-9) today announced that the University of Memphis will receive a $220,133 grant from the National Science Foundation for research on privacy in the transmission of encrypted data over wide-area networks. The research is being conducted by Professor Christos Papadopoulos, who holds the Sparks Family Chair of Excellence in Global Research Leadership in the Department of Computer Science.

Congressman Cohen made the following statement:

“I congratulate the University and Professor Papadopoulos on this prestigious National Science Foundation grant award. Clearly, privacy concerns must be addressed as more personal data travels over the internet and I am pleased to see this innovative research addressing them is being undertaken at the University.”

According to the National Science Foundation abstract of the research:

“The PIMAWAT (Privacy in Internet Measurements Applied to WAN And Telematics) project will demonstrate new methods to provide data networking datasets that respect end-user privacy, while still being able to support new research in network protocols, security, privacy, and machine learning. The main insight is that *most data today sent over the wide-area network (WAN) is encrypted*; thus, the challenge is to demonstrate what data is encrypted, detect and scrub any remaining leaks, and finally anonymize the metadata (who talks to whom) before sharing data.

“The intellectual merit of PIMAWAT will be to develop new methods to anonymize network traffic at scale, then use those new algorithms to evaluate potential data leakage, and demonstrate that real-world data sources can be scrubbed for sharing while respecting privacy. PIMAWAT plans to focus the investigator’s prior work on wide-area network data traffic. As possible, it will also explore vehicle telematics as a recently developing dataset that poses unique privacy opportunities and challenges, with a device (not person) focus, yet with geolocation and application details.

“The broader impacts of PIMAWAT will be to democratize the potential to collect and share network data through…

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SA congressman in vulnerable seat increases his focus on cyber security and ‘artificial intelligence’

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  1. SA congressman in vulnerable seat increases his focus on cyber security and ‘artificial intelligence’  San Antonio Express-News

    2. Full coverage

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Congressman wants an investigation on why Trump is still using his Galaxy S3 – Android Authority (blog)

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Android Authority (blog)

Congressman wants an investigation on why Trump is still using his Galaxy S3
Android Authority (blog)
There is lots of evidence to suggest he is using a Samsung Galaxy S3, which was first released nearly five years ago and is no longer getting any Android security updates. That has raised a lot of concerns that President Trump is making himself …

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Congressman to FCC: Fix phone network flaw that allows eavesdropping

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SS7 allows an attacker to use just a phone number to gain access to calls and texts to and from that phone—and can be used to undermine the security of WhatsApp and Telegram. (credit: Petr Kolář (modified by Ars))

A documented weakness in Signaling System 7 has been shown to allow widespread interception of phone calls and text messages (SS7 is the public switched telephone network signaling protocol used to set up and route phone calls; it also allows for things like phone number portability). This weakness in SS7 can even undermine the security of encrypted messaging systems such as WhatsApp and Telegram.

In an April segment of 60 Minutes, Democratic Congressman Ted Lieu of California allowed hackers to demonstrate how they could listen in on his calls. In light of the mass leak of congressional staffers’ contact information by hackers, Congressman Lieu is now urging the Federal Communications Commission to take action quickly to fix the problem with SS7. The hackers are purportedly tied to Russian intelligence.

The vulnerability in SS7 was revealed in a presentation at the RSA security conference in March. It exploits the use of SS7 by cellular networks to handle billing and phone location data for call routing. The vulnerability is open to anyone with access to SS7 signaling. This includes not just telecommunications companies that have “roaming” relationships with a phone’s primary carrier, but any state actor or hacker who has access to those companies’ networks. Using SS7, an attacker could create a proxy to route calls and text messages. He could intercept them and record them without the knowledge of the people on either end of the communications. An attacker could also spoof texts and calls from a number.

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Technology Lab – Ars Technica