Although EOSIO is the first widely adopted high throughput Delegated Proof of Stake system with millions of accounts and billions of transactions, little is known about its ecosystem. This paper performs a large-scale measurement study of the EOSIO blockchain and its associated DApps, develops techniques to automatically detect bots and fraudulent activity finding thousands of bot accounts (over 30% of the accounts in the platform) and real-world attacks (301 attack accounts): 80 attack accounts identified have been confirmed by DApp teams, causing 828,824 EOS tokens losses (roughly 2.6 million US$).

Yuheng Huang, Haoyu Wang, Lei Wu, Gareth Tyson, Xiapu Luo, Run Zhang, Xuanzhe Liu, Gang Huang and Xuxian Jiang. Understanding (Mis)Behavior on the EOSIO Blockchain. In ACM SIGMETRICS, Boston, MA (2020). [Acceptance Rate: 15%] [PDF]

This paper presents a characterisation of a multilingual social network in India called ShareChat. The authors collect an exhaustive dataset across 72 weeks before and during the Indian general elections of 2019, across 14 languages, investigating the cross lingual dynamics by clustering visually similar images together, and exploring how they move across language barriers.

Pushkal Agarwal, Kiran Garimella, Sagar Joglekar, Nishanth Sastry and Gareth Tyson. Characterizing User Content on a Multi-lingual Social Network. In 14th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM), Atlanta, GA (2020). [Acceptance Rate 17%] [PDF]

Home Security Cameras (HSCs) are now commonplace and constitute a growing part of the wider online video ecosystem. This paper
studies a major HSC provider (15.4M streams, 211K users). The study explores the per-user behaviour, identifying core clusters of users and extracts and identifies privacy risks and potential mitigations.

Jinyang Li, Zhenyu Li, Gareth Tyson and Gaogang Xie. Your Privilege Gives Your Privacy Away: An Analysis of a Home Security Camera Service. In 39th IEEE Joint Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM), Beijing, China (2020). [Acceptance Rate: 19%] [PDF]

Latif, S., Usman, M., Manzoor, S., Iqbal, W., Qadir, J., Tyson, G., Castro, I., Razi, A., Boulos, M.N.K., Weller, A. and Crowcroft, J., 2020. Leveraging Data Science To Combat COVID-19: A Comprehensive Review, 2020 [PDF]

Our paper “Mobile App Squatting” has been received the best student paper award at WWW 2020!

In “App Squatting”, attackers release apps with identifiers (e.g., app name or package name) that are confusingly similar to those of popular apps or well-known Internet brands. This paper presents the first in-depth measurement study of app squatting showing its prevalence and implications. The paper develops and releases a tool (AppCrazy) for automatically generating variations of app identifiers and applies it to the top-500 most popular apps in Google Play, identifying 10,553 squatting apps (an average of over 20 squatting apps for each legitimate one).
While more than half are malicious mobile app markets have not been successful in identifying and eliminating squatting apps.

Yangyu Hu, Haoyu Wang, Ren He, Li Li, Gareth Tyson, Ignacio Castro, Yao Guo, Lei Wu and Guoai Xu. “Mobile App Squatting”. In 29th Web Conference (WWW), Taipei, Taiwan (2020). [Acceptance Rate: 19%] [PDF]

Members of the lab are organising the Information-Centric Economic, Societal and Governance Workshop (ICE-SoGo), which will be co-located with the 7th ACM Conference on Information-Centric Networking in Montreal, Canada. 

The aim of ICE-SoGo is to foster discussions regarding economic, social and governance factors involved in deploying, operating and regulating information-centricity within the Internet. The workshop encourages a broad interpretation of “information-centricity”, and would welcome research related to Information Centric Networks (ICNs), Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), Cloud Storage, and even the Web more generally. Submitted papers must be at most six (6) pages long, but we also welcome shorter position papers. 

Further Details: http://conferences.sigcomm.org/acm-icn/2020/workshop-ice-sogo.html

Paper Submission Deadline: June 15, 2020

Tentative Workshop Date: Sep. 28, 2020