16:198:500:04 Light Seminar: Accountability in Online Life

Rutgers University

Fall 2011

Time:	Most meetings are Tuesdays, 5:00-6:15pm.
Location:	CoRE Building, Room 305 (CoRE B)

Seminar Description

The World Wide Web and other networked information systems provide enormous benefits by enabling access to unprecedented amounts of information. However, for many years, users have been frustrated by the fact that these systems also create significant problems. Sensitive data are disclosed, confidential corporate data are stolen, copyrights are infringed, and databases owned by one government organization are accessed by members of another in violation of government policy. The frequency of such incidents continues to increase, and an incident must now be truly outrageous to be considered newsworthy.

The standard technical approach to privacy and security in online life is preventive: before someone can access confidential data or take any other action that implicated privacy or security, she should be required to prove that she is authorized to do so. As the scale and complexity of online activity has grown, it has become apparent that the preventive approach is inadequate; an alternate approach includes accountability mechanisms to complement preventive measures.

In this light seminar / reading group, we will discuss papers that provide definitions and frameworks for accountability, as well as looking at a number of proposed and/or implemented systems from the perspective of accountability. After the initial meeting, students will take turns presenting papers. All students should read the papers to be presented before each meeting.

Schedule

Date	Paper(s) or Topic	Presenter
September 13	Overview and organization, Accountability and Deterrence in Online Life	Rebecca Wright
September 20	Towards a Formal Model of Accountability	Joe Wegehaupt
October 25	Making Currency Inexpensive with iOwe	Faisal Khan
November 1	Balancing Accountability and Privacy Using E-cash	Faisal Khan
November 8	Dissent: accountable anonymous group messaging	Sai Lu
November 15	Dissent: accountable anonymous group messaging, cont'd.	Sai Lu
Monday December 12 3-5pm	Accountable Virtual Machines	Joe Wegehaupt

Papers

The following is a list of papers appropriate to present in the seminar. Presenters, when applicable, are shown in square brackets. Students: if there are papers not on this list that you think should be added, let me know. Also let me know if you think something belongs in a different category than I've listed it in.

Papers on modeling accountability from the Computer Science community

[Rebecca] Accountability and Deterrence in Online Life, Joan Feigenbaum, James A. Hendler, Aaron D. Jaggard, Daniel J. Weitzner, and Rebecca N. Wright, ACM Web Science 2011.
[Joe] Towards a Formal Model of Accountability, Joan Feigenbaum, Aaron D. Jaggard, and Rebecca N. Wright, New Security Paradigms Workshop 2011.
Towards a Theory of Accountability and Audit, Radha Jagadeesan, Alan Jeffrey, Corin Pitcher, and James Riely, ESORICS 2009.
Accountability: definition and relationship to verifiability, Ralf Küsters, Tomasz Truderung, and Andreas Vogt, ACM CCS 2010.
Accountability Protocols: Formalized and Verified, Giampolo Bella and Lawrence C. Paulson, ACM TISSEC, 2006.
A Case for the Accountable Cloud, Andreas Haeberlen, LADIS 2009.
A Social Accountability Framework for Computer Networks, Kang Wang, Alexis J. Malozemoff, Ning Jia, Chunhui Han, and Muthucumaru Maheswaran, IEEE Globecom 2010.
Does deterrence work in reducing information security policy abuse by employees?, Qing Hu, Zhengchuan Xu, Tamara Dinev, and Hong Ling, CACM 2011.
Accountability in a Computerized Society, Helen Nissenbaum, Science and Engineering Ethics, vol. 2, no. 1, 2006.

Papers on accountability from other communities
Presentations of these papers should address to what extent these papers could apply to on-line life, whether models we've looked at could model aspects of what these papers talk about, etc.

Accountability and Abuses of Power in World Politics, Ruth W. Grant and Robert O. Keohane, American Political Science Review, 2005.
Structuring a "Dense Complexity": Accountability and the Project of Administrative Law, Jerry L. Mashaw, Article 4 in Issues in Legal Scholarship: The Reformation of American Administrative Law, 2005.
Also relevant, but a whole book: Holding Power to Account: Accountability in Modern Democracies, Richard Mulgan, Palgrave MacMillan, Basingstoke, 2003.

Papers on systems that provide (or might provide) some notion of accountability.
Presentations of these papers should include analysis of: what kind of accountability is provided? is not provided? what can be proven? what kinds of modifications might enable more, or different kinds of, accountability? etc.

[Sai] Dissent: accountable anonymous group messaging, Henry Corrigan-Gibbs and Bryan Ford, ACM CCS 2010.
[Faisal] Balancing Accountability and Privacy Using E-cash, Jan Camenisch, Susan Hohenberger, and Anna Lysyanskaya, SCN 2006.
PeerReview: Practical Accountability for Distributed Systems, Andreas Haeberlen, Petr Kuznetsov, and Peter Druschel, SOSP 2007.
[Joe] Accountable Virtual Machines, Andreas Haeberlen, Paarijaat Aditya, Rodrigo Rodrigues, and Peter Druschel, OSDI 2010.
CSAR: A Practical and Provable Technique to Make Randomized Systems Accountable, Michael Backes, Peter Druschel, Andreas Haeberlen, and Dominique Unruh, NDSS 2009.
Accountable Internet Protocol (AIP), David G. Andersen, Hari Balakrishnan, Nick Feamster, Teemu Koponen, Daekyeong Moon, and Scott Shenker, SIGCOMM 2008.
Accountable-subgroup multisignatures, Silvio Micali, Kazuo Ohta, and Leonid Reyzin, ACM CCS 2001.
[Faisal] Making Currency Inexpensive with iOwe, Dave Levin, Aaron Schulman, Katrina LaCurts, Neil Spring, and Bobby Bhattacharjee, NetEcon 2011.
Sprite: A Simple Cheat-Proof Credit-Based System for Mobile Ad-hoc Networks, Sheng Zhong, Jiang Chen, and Yang Richard Yang, INFOCOM 2003.
Blacklistable anonymous credentials: blocking misbehaving users without TTPs, Patrick P. Tsang, Man Ho Au, Apu Kapadia, and Sean W. Smith, ACM CCS 2007.
A Robust Reputation System for Mobile Ad-hoc Networks, Sonja Buchegger and Jean-Yves Le Boudec, Technical Report IC/2003/50, EPFL-IC-LCA, 2003.
A Reputation-Based Trust Management System for P2P Networks, Ali A. Selcuk, Ersin Uzun, Mark R. Pariente, CCGrid 2004.
Lots of other papers on e-cash and/or reputation-based systems could be listed here as well.