We describe the data transmitted to backend servers by the contact tracing apps now deployed in Europe with a view to evaluating user privacy. These apps consist of two separate components: a "client" app managed by the national public health authority and the Google/Apple Exposure Notification (GAEN) service, that on Android devices is managed by Google and is part of Google Play Services. We find that the health authority client apps are generally well behaved from a privacy point of view, although the privacy of the Irish, Polish, Danish and Latvian apps could be improved. In marked contrast, we find that the Google Play Services component of these apps is problematic from a privacy viewpoint. Even when minimally configured, Google Play Services still contacts Google servers roughly every 20 minutes, potentially allowing location tracking via IP address. In addition, the phone IMEI, hardware serial number, SIM serial number and IMSI, handset phone number etc are shared with Google, together with detailed data on phone activity. This data collection is enabled simply by enabling Google Play Services, even when all other Google services and settings are disabled, and so is unavoidable for users of GAEN-based contact tracing apps on Android.

This tutorial will introduce researchers to security related activities within some Internet standards development organisations (SDOs), mainly the Internet Engineering Task Force and the World Wide Web Consortium. Having reviewed basic structure and process issues, we will consider how both security researchers and the SDOs can benefit from improved interactions, and how researchers can best approach these SDOs with results. We will then consider a number of technical areas where additional security research or research outputs within the next 2-3 years would be of use to these SDOs. A number (perhaps 3) of these areas will be selected by the tutorial participants for detailed discussion on potentially relevant research. The topics range from the “political” layer (e.g. privacy, censor-reistant protocols), down to protocol-specific areas where highly focused research is needed (e.g. DHCP security, traffic analysis). The goal is to give participants an understanding of the needs and processes of these SDOs, so that researchers with relevant results can feed those into the Internet standards process, benefiting the work of those SDOs and possibly achieving greater real-world impact for the research.

Satellite communications are characterized by long delays, packet losses, and sometimes intermittent connectivity and link disruptions. The TCP/IP stack is ineffective against these impairments and even dedicated solutions, such as performance enhancing proxies (PEPs), can hardly tackle the most challenging environments, and create compatibility issues with current security protocols. An alternative solution arises from the delay- and disruption-tolerant networking (DTN) architecture, which specifies an overlay protocol, called bundle protocol (BP), on top of either transport protocols (TCP, UDP, etc.), or of lower layer protocols (Bluetooth, Ethernet, etc.). The DTN architecture provides long-term information storage on intermediate nodes, suitable for coping with disrupted links, long delays, and intermittent connectivity. By dividing the end-to-end path into multiple DTN hops, in a way that actually extends the TCP-splitting concept exploited in most PEPs, DTN allows the use of specialized protocols on the satellite (or space) links. This paper discusses the prospects for use of DTN in future satellite networks. We present a broad DTN overview, to make the reader familiar with the characteristics that differentiate DTN from ordinary TCP/IP networking, compare the DTN and PEP architectures and stacks, as a preliminary step for the subsequent DTN performance assessment carried out in practical LEO/GEO satellite scenarios. DTN security is studied next, examining the advantages over present satellite architectures, the threats faced in satellite scenarios, and also open issues. Finally, the relation between DTN and quality of service (QoS) is investigated, by focusing on QoS architectures and QoS tools and by discussing the state of the art of DTN research activity in modeling, routing, and congestion control.

Web 2.0 gives people a substantial role in content and metadata creation. New interpersonal connections are formed and existing connections become evident through Web 2.0 services. This newly created social network (SN) spans across multiple services and aggregating it could bring great value. In this work we present SONAR, an API for gathering and sharing SN information. We give a detailed description of SONAR, demonstrate its potential value through user scenarios, and show results from experiments we conducted with a SONAR-based social networking application. These suggest that aggregating SN information across diverse data sources enriches the SN picture and makes it more complete and useful for the end user.

We review the rationale behind the current design of the Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networking (DTN) Architecture and highlight some remaining open issues. Its evolution, from a focus on deep space to a broader class of heterogeneous networks that may suffer disruptions, affected design decisions spanning naming and addressing, message formats, data encoding methods, routing, congestion management and security. Having now achieved relative stability with the design, additional experience is required in long-running operational environments in order to fine tune our understanding of DTN concepts and the types of capabilities that are worth the investment in implementation complexity. We expect key management, handling of congestion, multicasting capability, and routing to remain active areas of research and development, and that DTN may continue to be an active research endeavor for at least the next few years.

As the technology underlying sensor networks becomes more advanced and reliable, ubiquitous computing will come closer to being a reality. This paper details the design and deployment of several sensor nodes that use the delay tolerant network approach in order to meet the relevant application requirements. Two applications are presented, lake water quality monitoring in rural lakes and noise level logging in urban areas and along motorways. The installations are discussed and initial results presented.

Employee directories play a valuable role in helping people find others to collaborate with, solve a problem, or provide needed expertise. Serving this role successfully requires accurate and up-to-date user profiles, yet few users take the time to maintain them. In this paper, we present a system that enables users to tag other users with key words that are displayed on their profiles. We discuss how people-tagging is a form of social bookmarking that enables people to organize their contacts into groups, annotate them with terms supporting future recall, and search for people by topic area. In addition, we show that people-tagging has a valuable side benefit: it enables the community to collectively maintain each others' interest and expertise profiles. Our user studies suggest that people tag other people as a form of contact management and that the tags they have been given are accurate descriptions of their interests and expertise. Moreover, none of the people interviewed reported offensive or inappropriate tags. Based on our results, we believe that peopletagging will become an important tool for relationship management in an organization.

With widespread access to e-mail, the world-wide web, and other information sources, people now use computers more for managing information than for managing applications. To support how people naturally and routinely organize information, computers ought to be able to reflect the categories, relationships, and cues that people rely on when thinking about and remembering facts. Toward this end, we created an Information Programming Toolkit (IPtk) that collects application-independent properties, indexes documents along many dimensions to create a personal record of information use, and provides convenient means for information access. The IPtk enables the development of smart user interfaces that automatically tailor information to a user's history and context of information use.