arXiv subjects

Austin Hounsel

Publications and source records attributed to Austin Hounsel.

7 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2021

Software-Supported Audits of Decision-Making Systems: Testing Google and Facebook's Political Advertising Policies

How can society understand and hold accountable complex human and algorithmic decision-making systems whose systematic errors are opaque to the public? These systems routinely make decisions on individual rights and well-being, and on protecting society and the democratic process. Practical and statistical constraints on external audits--such as dimensional complexity--can lead researchers and regulators to miss important sources of error in these complex decision-making systems. In this paper, we design and implement a software-supported approach to audit studies that auto-generates audit materials and coordinates volunteer activity. We implemented this software in the case of political advertising policies enacted by Facebook and Google during the 2018 U.S. election. Guided by this software, a team of volunteers posted 477 auto-generated ads and analyzed the companies' actions, finding systematic errors in how companies enforced policies. We find that software can overcome some common constraints of audit studies, within limitations related to sample size and volunteer capacity.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2021

Encryption without Centralization: Distributing DNS Queries Across Recursive Resolvers

Emerging protocols such as DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) and DNS-over-TLS (DoT) improve the privacy of DNS queries and responses. While this trend towards encryption is positive, deployment of these protocols has in some cases resulted in further centralization of the DNS, which introduces new challenges. In particular, centralization has consequences for performance, privacy, and availability; a potentially greater concern is that it has become more difficult to control the choice of DNS recursive resolver, particularly for IoT devices. Ultimately, the best strategy for selecting among one or more recursive resolvers may ultimately depend on circumstance, user, and even device. Accordingly, the DNS architecture must permit flexibility in allowing users, devices, and applications to specify these strategies. Towards this goal of increased de-centralization and improved flexibility, this paper presents the design and implementation of a refactored DNS resolver architecture that allows for de-centralized name resolution, preserving the benefits of encrypted DNS while satisfying other desirable properties, including performance and privacy.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2021

Can Encrypted DNS Be Fast?

In this paper, we study the performance of encrypted DNS protocols and conventional DNS from thousands of home networks in the United States, over one month in 2020. We perform these measurements from the homes of 2,693 participating panelists in the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) Measuring Broadband America program. We found that clients do not have to trade DNS performance for privacy. For certain resolvers, DoT was able to perform faster than DNS in median response times, even as latency increased. We also found significant variation in DoH performance across recursive resolvers. Based on these results, we recommend that DNS clients (e.g., web browsers) should periodically conduct simple latency and response time measurements to determine which protocol and resolver a client should use. No single DNS protocol nor resolver performed the best for all clients.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2021

Understanding How and Why University Students Use Virtual Private Networks

We study how and why university students chose and use VPNs, and whether they are aware of the security and privacy risks that VPNs pose. To answer these questions, we conducted 32 in-person interviews and a survey with 349 respondents, all university students in the United States. We find students are mostly concerned with access to content and privacy concerns were often secondary. They made tradeoffs to achieve a particular goal, such as using a free commercial VPN that may collect their online activities to access an online service in a geographic area. Many users expected that their VPNs were collecting data about them, although they did not understand how VPNs work. We conclude with a discussion of ways to help users make choices about VPNs.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2020

Identifying Disinformation Websites Using Infrastructure Features

Platforms have struggled to keep pace with the spread of disinformation. Current responses like user reports, manual analysis, and third-party fact checking are slow and difficult to scale, and as a result, disinformation can spread unchecked for some time after being created. Automation is essential for enabling platforms to respond rapidly to disinformation. In this work, we explore a new direction for automated detection of disinformation websites: infrastructure features. Our hypothesis is that while disinformation websites may be perceptually similar to authentic news websites, there may also be significant non-perceptual differences in the domain registrations, TLS/SSL certificates, and web hosting configurations. Infrastructure features are particularly valuable for detecting disinformation websites because they are available before content goes live and reaches readers, enabling early detection. We demonstrate the feasibility of our approach on a large corpus of labeled website snapshots. We also present results from a preliminary real-time deployment, successfully discovering disinformation websites while highlighting unexplored challenges for automated disinformation detection.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2020

Comparing the Effects of DNS, DoT, and DoH on Web Performance

Nearly every service on the Internet relies on the Domain Name System (DNS), which translates a human-readable name to an IP address before two endpoints can communicate. Today, DNS traffic is unencrypted, leaving users vulnerable to eavesdropping and tampering. Past work has demonstrated that DNS queries can reveal a user's browsing history and even what smart devices they are using at home. In response to these privacy concerns, two new protocols have been proposed: DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) and DNS-over-TLS (DoT). Instead of sending DNS queries and responses in the clear, DoH and DoT establish encrypted connections between users and resolvers. By doing so, these protocols provide privacy and security guarantees that traditional DNS (Do53) lacks. In this paper, we measure the effect of Do53, DoT, and DoH on query response times and page load times from five global vantage points. We find that although DoH and DoT response times are generally higher than Do53, both protocols can perform better than Do53 in terms of page load times. However, as throughput decreases and substantial packet loss and latency are introduced, web pages load fastest with Do53. Additionally, web pages successfully load more often with Do53 and DoT than DoH. Based on these results, we provide several recommendations to improve DNS performance, such as opportunistic partial responses and wire format caching.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2018

Automatically Generating a Large, Culture-Specific Blocklist for China

Internet censorship measurements rely on lists of websites to be tested, or "block lists" that are curated by third parties. Unfortunately, many of these lists are not public, and those that are tend to focus on a small group of topics, leaving other types of sites and services untested. To increase and diversify the set of sites on existing block lists, we use natural language processing and search engines to automatically discover a much wider range of websites that are censored in China. Using these techniques, we create a list of 1125 websites outside the Alexa Top 1,000 that cover Chinese politics, minority human rights organizations, oppressed religions, and more. Importantly, $\textit{none of the sites we discover are present on the current largest block list}$. The list that we develop not only vastly expands the set of sites that current Internet measurement tools can test, but it also deepens our understanding of the nature of content that is censored in China. We have released both this new block list and the code for generating it.

cs.CY↗