David P. Kormann

802.11b access point mapping

Considering some of the practical issues encountered when finding and mapping wireless network access points.

Defending against an Internet-based attack on the physical world

We discuss the dangers that scalable Internet functionality may present to the real world, focusing upon an attack that is simple, yet can have great impact, which we believe may occur quite soon. We offer and critique various solutions to this class of attack and hope to provide a warning to the Internet community of what is currently possible. The attack is, to some degree, a consequence of the availability of private information on the Web, and the increase in the amount of personal information that users must reveal to obtain Web services.

Secure remote access to an Internet Web server

We address the problem of secure remote access to a sites internal Web server from outside the firewall. The goal is to give authorized users access to sensitive information, while protecting the information from others. We implemented our solution using a one-time password scheme for client authentication and secure socket layer (SSL) for confidentiality. Our main design considerations were security, performance, ease of use, availability, and scale. We were further constrained by the desire to leave our firewall and local infrastructure unchanged.

Cobot in LambdaMOO: An Adaptive Social Statistics Agent

We describe our development of Cobot, a novel software agent who lives in LambdaMOO, a popular virtual world frequented by hundreds of users. Cobot’s goal was to become an actual part of that community. Here, we present a detailed discussion of the functionality that made him one of the objects most frequently interacted with in LambdaMOO, human or artificial. Cobot’s fundamental power is that he has the ability to collect social statistics summarizing the quantity and quality of interpersonal interactions. Initially, Cobot acted as little more than a reporter of this information; however, as he collected more and more data, he was able to use these statistics as models that allowed him to modify his own behavior. In particular, cobot is able to use this data to “self-program,” learning the proper way to respond to the actions of individual users, by observing how others interact with one another. Further, Cobot uses reinforcement learning to proactively take action in this complex social environment, and adapts his behavior based on multiple sources of human reward. Cobot represents a unique experiment in building adaptive agents who must live in and navigate social spaces.

Searching for privacy: design and implementation of a p3p-enabled search engine

Although the number of online privacy policies is increasing, it remains difficult for Internet users to understand them, let alone to compare policies across sites or identify sites with the best privacy practices. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) developed the Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P 1.0) specification to provide a standard computer-readable format for privacy policies. This standard enables web browsers and other user agents to interpret privacy policies on behalf of their users. This paper introduces our prototype P3P-enabled Privacy Bird Search engine. Users of this search service are given visual indicators of the privacy policies at sites included in query results. Our system acts as a front end to a general search engine by evaluating the P3P policies associated with search results against a users privacy preference settings. To improve system performance we cache unexpired P3P policy information (including information about the absence of P3P policies) for thousands of the most popular sites as well as for sites that have been returned in previous search results. We discuss the system architecture and its implementation, and consider the work necessary to evolve our prototype into a fully functional and efficient service.