Anatomy of a privacy fail – when “Dark Data” gives away your identity

[ZeroDay]

by Paul Ducklin
This week’s super-scary security topic is deanonymisation.

The media excitement was kindled after the BBC wrote up a short article

about an intriguing paper entitled Dark Data

, presented at the recent DEF CON conference in Las Vegas.

We weren’t at DEF CON, so we hoped that the many stories written about this fascinating paper would tell us something useful about what the researchers did, and what we could learn from that…

…but we were quickly disappointed, faced with little more the same brief story over and over again, told in the same brief way.

So we decided to dig into the matter ourselves, and soon found that the Dark Data paper was the English language version of a talk the researchers presented

in German last year at the 33rd Chaos Computer Club conference in Hamburg.

We were delighted to find that the German talk had a title that was itself in English, yet even cooler than the DEF CON version: Build your own NSA.

Source: Anatomy of a privacy fail – when “Dark Data” gives away your identity