29 citations · 92 across the 15 of their papers we have counts for
20 papers
A Study of China's Censorship and Its Evasion Through the Lens of Online Gaming
Yuzhou Feng, Ruyu Zhai, Radu Sion +1
For the past 20 years, China has increasingly restricted the access of minors to online games using addiction prevention systems (APSes). At the same time, and through different me…
Strategies and Vulnerabilities of Participants in Venezuelan Influence Operations
Ruben Recabarren, Bogdan Carbunar, Nestor Hernandez +1
Studies of online influence operations, coordinated efforts to disseminate and amplify disinformation, focus on forensic analysis of social networks or of publicly available datase…
SoK: Plausibly Deniable Storage
Chen Chen, Xiao Liang, Bogdan Carbunar +1
Data privacy is critical in instilling trust and empowering the societal pacts of modern technology-driven democracies. Unfortunately, it is under continuous attack by overreaching…
RacketStore: Measurements of ASO Deception in Google Play via Mobile and App Usage
Nestor Hernandez, Ruben Recabarren, Bogdan Carbunar +1
Online app search optimization (ASO) platforms that provide bulk installs and fake reviews for paying app developers in order to fraudulently boost their search rank in app stores,…
Toward Uncensorable, Anonymous and Private Access Over Satoshi Blockchains
Ruben Recabarren, Bogdan Carbunar
Providing unrestricted access to sensitive content such as news and software is difficult in the presence of adaptive and resourceful surveillance and censoring adversaries. In thi…
Private and Atomic Exchange of Assets over Zero Knowledge Based Payment Ledger
Zhimin Gao, Lei Xu, Keshav Kasichainula +3
Bitcoin brings a new type of digital currency that does not rely on a central system to maintain transactions. By benefiting from the concept of decentralized ledger, users who do…
Tithonus: A Bitcoin Based Censorship Resilient System
Ruben Recabarren, Bogdan Carbunar
Providing reliable and surreptitious communications is difficult in the presence of adaptive and resourceful state level censors. In this paper we introduce Tithonus, a framework t…
Search Rank Fraud De-Anonymization in Online Systems
Mizanur Rahman, Nestor Hernandez, Bogdan Carbunar +1
We introduce the fraud de-anonymization problem, that goes beyond fraud detection, to unmask the human masterminds responsible for posting search rank fraud in online systems. We c…
AbuSniff: Automatic Detection and Defenses Against Abusive Facebook Friends
Sajedul Talukder, Bogdan Carbunar
Adversaries leverage social network friend relationships to collect sensitive data from users and target them with abuse that includes fake news, cyberbullying, malware, and propag…
A Longitudinal Study of Google Play
Rahul Potharaju, Mizanur Rahman, Bogdan Carbunar
The difficulty of large scale monitoring of app markets affects our understanding of their dynamics. This is particularly true for dimensions such as app update frequency, control…
A Secure Mobile Authentication Alternative to Biometrics
Mozhgan Azimpourkivi, Umut Topkara, Bogdan Carbunar
Biometrics are widely used for authentication in consumer devices and business settings as they provide sufficiently strong security, instant verification and convenience for users…
Camera Based Two Factor Authentication Through Mobile and Wearable Devices
Mozhgan Azimpourkivi, Umut Topkara, Bogdan Carbunar
We introduce Pixie, a novel, camera based two factor authentication solution for mobile and wearable devices. A quick and familiar user action of snapping a photo is sufficient for…
Stateless Puzzles for Real Time Online Fraud Preemption
Mizanur Rahman, Ruben Recabarren, Bogdan Carbunar +1
The profitability of fraud in online systems such as app markets and social networks marks the failure of existing defense mechanisms. In this paper, we propose FraudSys, a real-ti…
Video Liveness for Citizen Journalism: Attacks and Defenses
Mahmudur Rahman, Mozhgan Azimpourkivi, Umut Topkara +1
The impact of citizen journalism raises important video integrity and credibility issues. In this article, we introduce Vamos, the first user transparent video "liveness" verificat…
Secure Management of Low Power Fitness Trackers
Mahmudur Rahman, Bogdan Carbunar, Umut Topkara
The increasing popular interest in personal telemetry, also called the Quantified Self or "lifelogging", has induced a popularity surge for wearable personal fitness trackers. Fitn…
Hardening Stratum, the Bitcoin Pool Mining Protocol
Ruben Recabarren, Bogdan Carbunar
Stratum, the de-facto mining communication protocol used by blockchain based cryptocurrency systems, enables miners to reliably and efficiently fetch jobs from mining pool servers.…
FairPlay: Fraud and Malware Detection in Google Play
Mahmudur Rahman, Mizanur Rahman, Bogdan Carbunar +1
Fraudulent behaviors in Google Android app market fuel search rank abuse and malware proliferation. We present FairPlay, a novel system that uncovers both malware and search rank f…
Spotting Suspicious Reviews via (Quasi-)clique Extraction
Paras Jain, Shang-Tse Chen, Mozhgan Azimpourkivi +2
How to tell if a review is real or fake? What does the underworld of fraudulent reviewing look like? Detecting suspicious reviews has become a major issue for many online services.…
Fit and Vulnerable: Attacks and Defenses for a Health Monitoring Device
Mahmudur Rahman, Bogdan Carbunar, Madhusudan Banik
The fusion of social networks and wearable sensors is becoming increasingly popular, with systems like Fitbit automating the process of reporting and sharing user fitness data. In…
Eat the Cake and Have It Too: Privacy Preserving Location Aggregates in Geosocial Networks
Bogdan Carbunar, Mahmudur Rahman, Jaime Ballesteros +1
Geosocial networks are online social networks centered on the locations of subscribers and businesses. Providing input to targeted advertising, profiling social network users becom…