Eric Pauley and Patrick McDaniel (University of Wisconsin–Madison)

Measurement of network data received from or transmitted over the public Internet has yielded a myriad of insights towards improving the security and privacy of deployed services. Yet, the collection and analysis of this data necessarily involves the processing of data that could impact human subjects, and anonymization often destroys the very phenomena under study. As a result, Internet measurement faces the unique challenge of studying data from human subjects who could not conceivably consent to its collection, and yet the measurement community has tacitly concluded that such measurement is beneficial and even necessary for its positive impacts. We are thus at an impasse: academics and practitioners routinely collect and analyze sensitive user data, and yet there exists no cohesive set of ethical norms for the community that justifies these studies. In this work, we examine the ethical considerations of Internet traffic measurement and analysis, analyzing the ethical considerations and remediations in prior works and general trends in the community. We further analyze ethical expectations in calls-for-papers, finding a general lack of cohesion across venues. Through our analysis and recommendations, we hope to inform future studies and venue expectations towards maintaining positive impact while respecting and protecting end users.

View More Papers

A Transcontinental Analysis of Account Remediation Protocols of Popular...

Philipp Markert (Ruhr University Bochum), Andrick Adhikari (University of Denver), Sanchari Das (University of Denver)

Read More

The Vulnerabilities Less Exploited: Cyberattacks on End-of-Life Satellites

Frank Lee and Gregory Falco (Johns Hopkins University) Presenter: Frank Lee

Read More

VulHawk: Cross-architecture Vulnerability Detection with Entropy-based Binary Code Search

Zhenhao Luo (College of Computer, National University of Defense Technology), Pengfei Wang (College of Computer, National University of Defense Technology), Baosheng Wang (College of Computer, National University of Defense Technology), Yong Tang (College of Computer, National University of Defense Technology), Wei Xie (College of Computer, National University of Defense Technology), Xu Zhou (College of Computer,…

Read More

Reconciling the Hacker Spirit

Yan Shoshitaishvili (Arizona State University)

Read More