SUBSCRIBE
SUBSCRIBE
EXPLORE +
  • About infoDOCKET
  • Academic Libraries on LJ
  • Research on LJ
  • News on LJ
  • Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Libraries
    • Academic Libraries
    • Government Libraries
    • National Libraries
    • Public Libraries
  • Companies (Publishers/Vendors)
    • EBSCO
    • Elsevier
    • Ex Libris
    • Frontiers
    • Gale
    • PLOS
    • Scholastic
  • New Resources
    • Dashboards
    • Data Files
    • Digital Collections
    • Digital Preservation
    • Interactive Tools
    • Maps
    • Other
    • Podcasts
    • Productivity
  • New Research
    • Conference Presentations
    • Journal Articles
    • Lecture
    • New Issue
    • Reports
  • Topics
    • Archives & Special Collections
    • Associations & Organizations
    • Awards
    • Funding
    • Interviews
    • Jobs
    • Management & Leadership
    • News
    • Patrons & Users
    • Preservation
    • Profiles
    • Publishing
    • Roundup
    • Scholarly Communications
      • Open Access

February 23, 2018 by Gary Price

Harvard and MIT Project: “Private Browsing Gets More Private”

February 23, 2018 by Gary Price

From MIT:

This week, at the Network and Distributed Systems Security Symposium, researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Harvard University presented a paper describing a new system, dubbed Veil, that makes private browsing more private.
Veil would provide added protections to people using shared computers in offices, hotel business centers, or university computing centers, and it can be used in conjunction with existing private-browsing systems and with anonymity networks such as Tor, which was designed to protect the identity of web users living under repressive regimes.
[Clip]
With existing private-browsing sessions, [Frank] Wang [an MIT graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science and first author on the paper] explains, a browser will retrieve data much as it always does and load it into memory. When the session is over, it attempts to erase whatever it retrieved.
But in today’s computers, memory management is a complex process, with data continuously moving around between different cores (processing units) and caches (local, high-speed memory banks). When memory banks fill up, the operating system might transfer data to the computer’s hard drive, where it could remain for days, even after it’s no longer being used.
Generally, a browser won’t know where the data it downloaded has ended up. Even if it did, it wouldn’t necessarily have authorization from the operating system to delete it.
Veil gets around this problem by ensuring that any data the browser loads into memory remains encrypted until it’s actually displayed on-screen. Rather than typing a URL into the browser’s address bar, the Veil user goes to the Veil website and enters the URL there. A special server — which the researchers call a blinding server — transmits a version of the requested page that’s been translated into the Veil format.
The Veil page looks like an ordinary webpage: Any browser can load it. But embedded in the page is a bit of code — much like the embedded code that would, say, run a video or display a list of recent headlines in an ordinary page — that executes a decryption algorithm. The data associated with the page is unintelligible until it passes through that algorithm.
Once the data is decrypted, it will need to be loaded in memory for as long as it’s displayed on-screen. That type of temporarily stored data is less likely to be traceable after the browser session is over. But to further confound would-be attackers, Veil includes a few other security features.

Learn More, Read the Complete MIT Article
See Also: Direct to Full Text of Paper Presented at Symposium: “Veil: Private Browsing Semantics Without Browser-side Assistance”
15 pages; PDF.
See Also: Program and Links All Papers Presented at Network and Distributed Systems Security Symposium 2018

Filed under: Data Files, Journal Articles, Management and Leadership, News, Patrons and Users

SHARE:

About Gary Price

Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com. Gary is also the co-founder of infoDJ an innovation research consultancy supporting corporate product and business model teams with just-in-time fact and insight finding.

ADVERTISEMENT

Archives

Job Zone

ADVERTISEMENT

Related Infodocket Posts

Collections: JSTOR is Introducing a New Archive Fee Model Option

From a Letter by Ithaka President Kevin Guthrie: I recently shared the 2023 priorities ITHAKA has set to help provide the infrastructure the academic community needs to support research, teaching, and learning ...

Funding: HathiTrust Receives 5-Year, $1 Million Grant From Mellon Foundation

Here’s the Full Text of HathiTrust Announcement: HathiTrust, a member-based organization hosted by the University of Michigan, has received a 5-year, $1 million grant from the Mellon Foundation to fund ...

Library as Publisher: "UMass Amherst Libraries Announce Publication of Open-Access Peregrine Falcon Curriculum

From UMass Amherst Libraries (Full Text): The University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries are pleased to announce the publication of The UMass Amherst Libraries Falcon Curriculum: An Open Source, Common Core PreK-12 ...

Report From Annenberg/UPenn: "Americans Don’t Understand What Companies Can Do With Their Personal Data — and That’s a...

From the Annenberg School of Communications/U. of Pennsylvania: In a new report, “Americans Can’t Consent to Companies’ Use of Their Data,” researchers asked a nationally representative group of more than ...

Fast Company: "Study: Over 50% of Academics Admit to Pirating Research Papers"

From Fast Company: More than 50% of academics have used piracy websites like Sci-Hub in order to bypass paywalls for research they want to access, according to a recent study published in ...

AI Models Spit Out Photos of Real People and Copyrighted Images; New Web Archives from Columbia University Libraries...

AI Models Spit Out Photos of Real People and Copyrighted Images (via MIT Technology Review) California: Orange Unified School District Reinstates Digital Library After Parent Concerns (via Voice of OC) ...

Journal Article: "Libraries Advancing Health Equity: A Literature Review"

The article linked below (full-text) was recently published Reference Services Review. Title Libraries Advancing Health Equity: A Literature Review Authors Amanda J. Wilson National Library of Medicine Catherine Staley National ...

Chicago Sun-Times Editorial Board: "As Libraries Turn the Page on Bookmobiles, Something is Lost"

From the Chicago Sun-Times Editorial Board: Anyone who has spent time on a bookmobile has learned enough to know nothing withstands the change of time. Still, we lament the slow ...

LC's African and Middle Eastern Division Announces Release of the Africana Historic Postcard Collection

From The Library of Congress (via a 4 Corners of the World Blog Post by Anchi Hoh): The African and Middle Eastern Division is delighted to announce the rerelease of the ...

New From IFLA: "Marrakesh Monitoring Report - February 2023 Update"

From the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA): The chart [monitoring report]…is an updated version of previous monitoring reports. Where a country has been updated or added since ...

ROUNDUP: Research4Life Reaches 200,000 Resources; Majority of Research Papers Published by Cambridge University Press Now Open Access; &...

Association of Research Libraries (ARL) Seeks to Hire Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Developing a Globally Fair Pricing Model for Open Access Academic Publishing (via cOAlition S) Majority of ...

NY Times: "Turning Nairobi’s Public Libraries Into 'Palaces for the People'"

From The NY Times: In 1931, the first library in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, opened its doors — to white patrons only. Nearly a century later, Kenyans dressed in the slinky ...

ADVERTISEMENT

FOLLOW US ON TWITTER

Tweets by infoDOCKET

ADVERTISEMENT

This coverage is free for all visitors. Your support makes this possible.

This coverage is free for all visitors. Your support makes this possible.

Primary Sidebar

  • News
  • Reviews+
  • Technology
  • Programs+
  • Design
  • Leadership
  • People
  • COVID-19
  • Advocacy
  • Opinion
  • INFOdocket
  • Job Zone

Reviews+

  • Booklists
  • Prepub Alert
  • Book Pulse
  • Media
  • Readers' Advisory
  • Self-Published Books
  • Review Submissions
  • Review for LJ

Awards

  • Library of the Year
  • Librarian of the Year
  • Movers & Shakers 2022
  • Paralibrarian of the Year
  • Best Small Library
  • Marketer of the Year
  • All Awards Guidelines
  • Community Impact Prize

Resources

  • LJ Index/Star Libraries
  • Research
  • White Papers / Case Studies

Events & PD

  • Online Courses
  • In-Person Events
  • Virtual Events
  • Webcasts
  • About Us
  • Contact Us
  • Advertise
  • Subscribe
  • Media Inquiries
  • Newsletter Sign Up
  • Submit Features/News
  • Data Privacy
  • Terms of Use
  • Terms of Sale
  • FAQs
  • Careers at MSI


© 2023 Library Journal. All rights reserved.


© 2022 Library Journal. All rights reserved.