Research

Citizen Lab Postdoctoral Fellow Christopher Parsons published a paper titled “Beyond Privacy: Articulating the Broader Harms of Pervasive Mass Surveillance” in Media and Communication. The paper explores how dominant theories of privacy grapple with the pervasive mass surveillance activities undertaken by western signals intelligence activities, including those of the NSA, CSE, GCHQ, GCSB, and ASD.

This report analyzes a campaign of targeted attacks against an NGO working on environmental issues in Southeast Asia. Our analysis reveals connections between these attacks, recent strategic web compromises against Burmese government websites, and previous campaigns targeting groups in the Tibetan community.

This post describes the results of Internet scanning we conducted to identify the users of FinFisher, a sophisticated and user-friendly spyware suite sold exclusively to governments.

As the United Nations General Assembly begins its milestone 70th session, international digital security is high on the agenda. One starting point for discussion is likely to be the International Code of Conduct for Information Security (the “Code”). This analysis explores how the Code has developed over time, impetus behind the changes made, and the potential impact of the Code on international human rights law and its application. It is accompanied by an interactive comparison of the 2015 and 2011 versions of the Code.

This report describes the results of two independent security audits of Smart Sheriff, one by researchers who collaborated at the 2015 Citizen Lab Summer Institute (held at the Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto), and the other by the auditing firm Cure53. The combined audits identified twenty-six security vulnerabilities in recent versions of Smart Sheriff (versions 1.7.5 and under). These vulnerabilities could be leveraged by a malicious actor to take control of nearly all Smart Sheriff accounts and disrupt service operations.

This report describes an elaborate phishing campaign using two-factor authentication against targets in Iran’s diaspora, and at least one Western activist.

This article, written by Postdoctoral Fellow Christopher Parsons and CIPPIC Staff lawyer Tamir Israel, analyzes how successive federal governments of Canada have actively sought to weaken the communications encryption available to Canadians. The article covers regulations imposed on mobile telecommunications providers, state authorities’ abilities to compel decryption keys from telecommunications providers writ large, and Canada’s signals intelligence agency’s deliberate propagation of flawed encryption protocols.

In this paper presented at USENIX FOCI 2015 we use reverse engineering to provide a view into how keyword censorship operates on four popular social video platforms in China: YY, 9158, Sina Show, and GuaGua. We also find keyword surveillance capabilities on YY. Our findings show inconsistencies in the implementation of censorship and the keyword lists used to trigger censorship events between the platforms we analyzed. We reveal a range of targeted content including criticism of the government and collective action. These results provide evidence that there is no monolithic set of rules that govern how information controls are implemented in China.

The Media Democracy Fund, in conjunction with the Ford Foundation and Open Society Foundations, selected Cyber Stewards Network partners Asociación por los Derechos Civiles (ADC) and Derechos Digitales as recipients of the Quantified Society Grants.

This research note outlines what we know about the use of Hacking Team’s Remote Control System (RCS) by South Korea’s National Intelligence Service (NIS). The note synthesizes information found in publicly leaked materials, as well as our own research.