GREPSEC VI Workshop Program

Stalkerware is a form of malware that allows for the abusive monitoring of intimate partners. In this talk, we describe how we leveraged our work in analyzing smartphone apps to examine the problem of stalkerware and to build relationships within the Coalition Against Stalkerware to better understand how these apps our deployed. We discuss our analysis of monetization among over 6,000 stalkerware apps by examining their decompiled source code and discovering insights about in-app advertising libraries, payment processors, and how stalkerware apps have responded to changes in the Google Play Store’s terms of service banning stalkerware. We also examine code reuse and repackaging in these apps to understand both who is authoring them and how they are making money in order to best combat this pernicious malware.

The Internet has become a hostile place for users’ traffic. Network-based actors, including ISPs and governments, increasingly practice sophisticated forms of censorship, content injection, and traffic throttling, as well as surveillance and other privacy violations. My work attempts to expose these threats and develop technologies to better safeguard users. In this talk, I’ll cover a decade's summary of my approach to monitoring Internet censorship. I introduced an entirely new family of censorship measurement techniques, based on network side-channels, that can remotely detect censorship events occurring between distant pairs of network locations. To overcome the systems and data science challenges of operating these techniques and synthesizing their results into a holistic view of online censorship, my students and I created Censored Planet, a censorship observatory that continuously tests the reachability of thousands of popular or sensitive sites from over 100,000 vantage points in 221 countries. Next, I’ll discuss our efforts to understand and defend the consumer VPN ecosystem. Although millions of end-users rely on VPNs to protect their privacy and security, this multibillion-dollar industry includes numerous snakeoil products, is laxly regulated, and remains severely understudied. To address this, my lab created VPNalyzer, a project that aims to bring transparency and better security to consumer VPNs. Our work includes a cross-platform test suite that crowd-sources VPN security testing, coupled with large-scale user studies that aim to understand the needs and threat models of VPN users. During the talk, my aim is to delve into the valuable lessons learned from these works, which have played a crucial role in my academic success.