Damon McCoy

Talk: Do You See What I See? Differential Treatment of Anonymous Users

The utility of anonymous communication is undermined by a growing number of websites treating users of such services in a degraded fashion. The second-class treatment of anonymous users ranges from outright rejection to limiting their access to a subset of the service’s functionality or imposing hurdles such as CAPTCHA-solving. To date, the observation of such practices has relied upon anecdotal reports catalogued by frustrated anonymity users. In this talk I will present a study to methodically enumerate and characterize, in the context of Tor, the treatment of anonymous users as second-class Web citizens.

Bio:
Prof. McCoy is an Assistant Professor at New York University in the Computer Science and Engineering department. His focus is on empirical measurements of the socio-economics of cyber attackers, privacy enhancing technologies, and security of cyber-physical systems.