a byte of ICSI, May 2015

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The Great Cannon - Another Tool in China’s Censorship Box

The Chinese government appears to have used distributed denial-of-service attacks against a nonprofit organization, GreatFire.org, that helps Chinese users circumvent the administration’s Internet censorship regime, according to a report by the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs that ICSI researchers collaborated on. While the Chinese administration has long censored the Internet by using a tool known as the Great Firewall to block traffic to certain web sites, the new system works offensively by redirecting traffic to attack targets.

The researchers say that the tool, which they have named the Great Cannon, was responsible for a flood of Internet traffic on March 16 that nearly crashed servers rented from Amazon Web Services by GreatFire to provide mirror images of blocked sites. On March 26, a similar attack was directed at GitHub pages run by GreatFire.org. At its height, the attack was racking up $30,000 a day in bandwidth fees from Amazon, according to GreatFire’s blog. GitHub called the attack on its repositories the largest distributed denial of service attack in its history.

"This is very much an escalation."
Bill Marczak in
“China Deploys New Weapon for Online Censorship in Form of ‘Great Cannon’”
April 10, 2015, Andrea Peterson, The Washington Post
 

Sylvia Ratnasamy Wins ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award

Professor Sylvia Ratnasamy is the winner of the 2014 ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, given each year to an outstanding young computer professional. Ratnasamy, a senior Networking and Security researcher as well as an assistant professor of computer science at UC Berkeley, is recognized for her contributions to the first efficient design for distributed hash tables, a critical element in large-scale distributed and peer-to-peer computing systems. ACM cited Ratnasamy’s 2001 paper, “A Scalable, Content-Addressable Network,” which she co-wrote while a graduate student with fellow members of ACIRI, the precursor of ICSI’s Networking and Security Group. The paper is the seventh most cited in the area of networks and communications, according to Microsoft Academic Search.Read more.

What's Next

upcoming seminars

Sonia Chiasson is the Canada Research Chair in Human Oriented Computer Security and a faculty member in the School of Computer Science at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada.

Understanding Users' (In)Secure Behaviour

Wednesday, May 20, 2015
2:00 p.m., ICSI Lecture Hall

Elisabeth Wehling is a postdoctoral fellow in the AI Group, funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) through the FITweltweit program, administered by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).

A Nation Under Joint Custody: How Conflicting Family Models Explain Conservatism and Liberalism

Thursday, May 21, 2015
4:00 p.m., ICSI Lecture Hall

Nelson Morgan is a speech researcher and the former director of ICSI as well as a professor in residence emeritus at UC Berkeley. He led the speech research effort at ICSI from 1988 through 2012.

Are Learned Features Enough for Robust DNNs? A Question of Nature vs. Nurture

Thursday, May 28, 2015
4:00 p.m., ICSI Lecture Hall

Who's Visiting

• Martha Larson, Audio and Multimedia, Visiting Researcher, Delft University of Technology, Netherlands (03/26 - 9/15)
• Manfred Eppe, Artificial Intelligence, DAAD Postdoc (4/13/2015 - 03/31/2016)
• Marco Caselli, Networking and Security, Graduate Student at the University of Twente, Netherlands (04/20 - 7/25)
• Fred Roosta, Research Initiatives, Postdoc (arrived 4/30)
• Marian Harbach, Networking and Security, DAAD Postdoc (5/1/2015 - 10/31/2016)
• Antonia Scatton, AI, Visiting Researcher, Reframe America (5/1 - 7/31)
• Vadim Shapiro, Research Initiatives, Visiting Researcher, University of Wisconsin (5/1 - 7/31)

Check out our redesigned pages

We’ve redesigned the web page for our visiting program and added a page listing potential mentors of visiting scholars.