Some months ago I attended a presentation where one of my colleagues, Panos, showed how he used Python to process data in a meaningful way. In particular, he showed how he extracted some interesting findings from a .csv file coming from the Boston Mayor’s 24 Hour Constituent Service web site. Such findings involved incidents that were still open by then, how many incidents were closed in a justifiable amount of time and others. Continue reading
Author Archives: Dimitris Mitropoulos
Using Search Engines to Uncover Sensitive Data on the Web
Search engines are powerful tools that can really help you with your work. Apart from finding useful resources and interesting articles, a search engine can be used for other practical purposes. Specifically, if you don’t know which word to use exactly in the phrase you are writing down, or if you do not remember how to spell it, you can use a search engine to find an answer. You can also search for specific terms within a web page and make sure if they exist or not. Continue reading
How to Hack a Sketchy e-voting System
The quintessence of an e-voting transaction is to be secure. In the e-voting context, security issues are very subtle. This is because there are features that clash with each other. For example, guaranteeing anonymity makes it harder to track election fraud. In addition, security in e-voting is highly related to the type of the technology used during the process. In distance e-voting, the voter can cast his vote from his personal computer by sending it to a central server via the Internet. The electronic, network-based nature of the latter makes it susceptible to a wide range of attacks. Continue reading
Security Bugs in Large Software Ecosystems
In a previous blog post, I discussed about the occurrence of security bugs through software evolution. In this post we will examine their existence in a large software ecosystem. To achieve this, together with four other colleagues (Vasilios Karakoidas, Georgios Gousios, Panos Louridas and Diomidis Spinellis) we used the FindBugs static analysis tool, to analyze all the projects that exist in the Maven central repository (approximately 260GB of interdependent project versions).
Fatal Injection: The Client’s Side
In a previous blog post I discussed about a critical class of web attacks known as code injection attacks. In particular, I presented a subset of such attacks where target entities exist on the server. Here we will talk about the emerging subset of dynamic code injection attacks, which, except for server-side entities, threaten network-oriented applications hosted in a client machine, such as the browser and messaging applications.