Valerie Zhao ’18 was recognized with an Honorable Mention in the 2018 Computing Research Association Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Awards. Valerie’s summer research was previously featured here. Valerie is currently pursuing research on the design of dynamic binary instrumentation tools for analyzing software at the machine code level, advised by Ben Wood.
Month: December 2017
Ada presented their recent paper, “Rewriting History: Changing the Archived Web from the Present” at ACM CCS 2017 in Dallas, TX in early November. In this paper, Ada studied web archives, which are websites such as the Wayback Machine that allow anyone on the web to time travel and see what the web looked like decades ago. Through analysis of the design of web archives and their interactions with other web technologies, this paper demonstrated a number of techniques by which malicious parties could modify the web of the past, injecting their own deceptive content so that anyone visiting a web archive will see not the historical contents of the pages they view, but an attacker’s deceptive content. The work was performed with attention to ethics, and the results were disclosed to the staff at the Wayback Machine, who quickly deployed several effective defenses against the vulnerabilities discovered, giving this paper real world impact.
The website of Wellesley College Circa 2000. You can visit it live at: http://web.archive.org/web/20000304134343/http://www.wellesley.edu:80/