Dominik Herrmann, post-doctoral researcher in the Security in Distributed Systems Group (SVS) at University of Hamburg, Germany gives a talk about “DNS Traffic Analysis: Opportunities, Risks, and (Self-)Defenses”.
Abstract: This talk explores the benefits and risks of collecting and analyzing DNS query traffic. First, it is shown how nameservers can exploit characteristic query patterns to infer the complete URLs of visited websites. Further, the results of a large-scale study suggest that nameservers can leverage supervised learning to track users over long periods of time even when their IP address changes regularly. When used for intrusion detection or during forensic analysis, these techniques improve network security. However, they can also be misused to track online activities of users without their consent. Therefore, the talk presents tailored tools for privacy-preserving name resolution that are promising because they offer better usability and performance than generic anonymity services like Tor.
This event is hosted by the Vienna ACM SIGSAC Chapter.