Why and how does cheating occur?
A rich theory of cryptographic privacy and correctness has emerged in the last 30 years. In this course, we seek to apply the principles from this theory to describe, analyze, and perhaps mediate the social phenomena of "cheating". We draw examples from polling, online transactions, electronic markets, auctions, etc.
This research seminar will alternate its focus between broad conceptual questions and intricate technical solutions. There will be considerable time for discussion; a preliminary list of topics is presented below. You will be expected to make a class presentation for one of the topics and complete a class project.
- Correctness and Sampling
- W Jan16 Introduction & Overview
- M Jan23 Polling Failure in CS
Secretly Monopolizing the CPU Without Superuser Privileges
Dan Tsafrir and Yoav Etsion and Dror G. Feitelson. [pdf] - W Jan28 Polling Failure in Elections
Pollsters, Historical failures, More modern and chronic failures
Bandwagon and Underdog Effects and the Possibility of Election Predictions, Herbert A. Simon, The Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 18, No. 3 (Autumn, 1954), pp. 245-253 [pdf] - The Technical Cost of Privacy
- First Contact: A Security Problem
- Overview of the TLS protocol
- Performance papers
Anatomy and performance of SSL processing, L Zhao, R Iyer, S Makineni, L Bhuyan. [pdf]
Managing the performance impact of web security, A. Stubblefield, A.D. Rubin and D.S. Wallach. [pdf] - Extensions of TLS
Fast-Track Session Establishment for TLS, Boneh and Shacham.[pdf]
Client Side Caching for TLS, Shacham, Boneh, and Rescorla [pdf] - Surveys
- Browser Manipulation
- Web trackers
- You Peek, You Lose [Crimson][Slashdot]
- Privacy in Markets
- Stock exchanges and financial markets
- Cheating in markets
Penny-jumping, front-running, pumping
- Cryptographic Securities Exchanges
Proceedings of Financial Cryptography and Data Security '07 [pdf]
- Auctions
Practical secrecy-preserving, verifiably correct and trustworthy auctions. D.C.Parkes, M.O.Rabin, S.M.Shieber and C.Thorpe. Electronic Commerce Research and Applications, 2007.
FCC License Auction Design: A 12-Year Experiment
David Porter and Vernon Smith, [pdf] - Correctness and Signalling
- Signalling in the Spectrum Auctions
- Collusion-free Protocols
Matt Lepinski and Silvio Micali and abhi shelat, Symposium on the Theory of Computation (STOC'05), Baltimore, MD, May 2005, p.543-552. [pdf]
In this segment, we study one aspect of the technical cost of privacy. Specifically, we study a simple web privacy protocol, HTTPS, and try to determine why it is not as widely deployed as it should be.
Collusive Bidding: Lessons from the FCC Spectrum Auctions, Peter Cramton and Jesse A. Schwartz,Journal of Regulatory Economics, 17, 229-252, May 2000. [pdf]
You will present one or more papers during the term and you will complete a final project for the class. Several topics will be generated during the discussions in the course.