iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Anyway, I digress. Read Jenny's paper. It's illuminating. Older people are far from being digitally illiterate, and we are not serving their needs well at the moment. And we have to fix this, sooner rather than later. (5/5)

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A lot of us have completely moved all asset management online. I haven't been to my bank since 2005. Yet, a lot of estate planning does not account for, or even reflect that new reality. (4/5)

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There is a growing need for estate planners with digital literacy. Shockingly, this is more often than not an afterthought. With GenXers/Xennials starting to get gray, there is -- in my opinion -- a real need here. (3/5)

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Grossly simplifying: key finding is that older individual don't really care about their purely digital assets (pictures, etc). They do care about digital artifacts (e.g., email, etc) that could make it harder for their heirs to manage estate transmission. (2/5)

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Nicolas Christin @nc2y.bsky.social · 20/10/2025

My student Jenny Tang just presented our work at #chi26. We have been interested in post-mortem management of online accounts (1/5) andrew.cmu.edu/user/nicolas...

andrew.cmu.edu

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Last week my student Ally Nisenoff published "Exploiting the Shared Storage API" at @acm_ccs: www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/nicolas... 3 days later, Google announced they're abandoning Shared Storage: privacysandbox.com/news/update-... (Correlation doesn't imply causation. Interesting, though.)

andrew.cmu.edu

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Nicolas Christin @nc2y.bsky.social · 11/09/2025

We're hosting the 7th intl' conf. on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT'25) at Carnegie Mellon on Oct. 8-10. Join us to hear about the latest exciting developments in crypto research. Registration closes on Sept 16! advfintech.org/aft25/attend... (Program: advfintech.org/aft25/progra...)

advfintech.org

Advances in Financial Technologies

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Nicolas Christin @nc2y.bsky.social · 15/08/2025

That’s a wrap for me at #usesec25 Conferences should really consider reusing the tag holders, the amount of wasted plastic is staggering

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Nicolas Christin @nc2y.bsky.social · 15/08/2025

“Canadian pharmacist helps run notorious deepfake porn site.” The online crime jokes write themselves.

Nicolas Christin @nc2y.bsky.social · 14/08/2025

Ah true but I should try again today then

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Reposted by Nicolas Christin

Wentao Guo @wentaoguo.bsky.social · 13/08/2025

I'm presenting my USENIX paper "How Researchers De-Identify Data in Practice" at 9am this Thursday. Kudos to my co-authors Paige Pepitone, @adamaviv.bsky.social, and @mmazurek.bsky.social. Come say hi—I am on the academic job market! Here's the paper: www.usenix.org/conference/u... #usesec25

Poster for our paper "How Researchers De-Identify Data in Practice"

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Nicolas Christin @nc2y.bsky.social · 13/08/2025

Taro just presented this at #usesec25, and will be manning the poster shortly. If you are around we would love to hear from you.

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Nicolas Christin @nc2y.bsky.social · 13/08/2025

I’m not sure there is a more clichéed Seattle experience than having a latte at a local coffee shop with some salmon on toast while they’re blaring Soundgarden’s “Outshined.”

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Nicolas Christin @nc2y.bsky.social · 12/08/2025

My student Jenny Tang (coadvised with @lujobauer.bsky.social) is making friends at SOUPS with our paper on looking at 10 years of SOUPS papers and reviewing how solid the stats were. Basically: not great, not great at all. (And that includes my own work.) Paper: www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/nicolas...

andrew.cmu.edu

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Blockchain Address Poisoning

TLDR: Address poisoning is a thing. Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2501.16681 Real-time website: cryptotrade.cylab.cmu.edu/poisoning/ Real-time twitter bot: x.com/toxin_tagger (no BlueSky bot yet, sorry, soon I hope) (7/7 end)

arxiv.org

In many blockchains, e.g., Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain (BSC), the primary representation used for wallet addresses is a hardly memorable 40-digit hexadecimal string. As a result, users often select ...

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We simulated the lookalike address generation process across various software- and hardware-based implementations. One large attacker group appears to use GPUs for this attack! The paper also discusses some defenses. (6/7)

100

We discovered a few large attack entities using clustering techniques. Larger groups are vastly profitable and win against smaller attack groups. We uncovered some attack strategies, such as populations they target, success conditions, and cross-chain attacks. (5/7)

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We developed a detection system and performed measurements on two years of ETH and BSC. We identified 13x the number of attack attempts reported previously—in all, 270M on-chain attacks targeting 17M victims. 6,633 incidents have caused at least 83.8M USD in losses. (4/7)

The attacker generates “lookalike” addresses that resemble the victim’s recipient’s address, engages with the victim to “poison” the transaction history, and fools the victim into sending their assets to the attacker by mistake. (3/7)

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Background: Crypto wallet addresses are usually impossible to memorize. As a result, users often select addresses from their recent transaction history, which facilitates phishing-like attacks: blockchain address poisoning. (2/7)

Blockchain Address Poisoning

New research alert 🚨 from my group, “Blockchain Address Poisoning” (Tsuchiya et al.), to appear at USENIX Security 2025 (arxiv.org/abs/2501.16681)! As a follow-up, we also developed a real-time detection system: cryptotrade.cylab.cmu.edu/poisoning/ and x.com/toxin_tagger (1/7)

arxiv.org

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Mike Wiser @drmikewiser.bsky.social · 17/06/2025

Just because your prof didn't file an academic dishonesty report does not mean that they don't know you cheated. Knowing you did it and proving it to the hearing board are two different thresholds.

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Nicolas Christin @nc2y.bsky.social · 16/06/2025

Details: it's likely that there are some symbol mismatches between some homebrew libraries linked against old OpenGL libs and the new OpenGL shipping with Sequoia. This drove me nuts. So I'm posting this here in hopes people don't waste their time. Oh, and don't ask an LLM, they're clueless.

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Nicolas Christin @nc2y.bsky.social · 16/06/2025

PSA: If you're using homebrew, and discovered that MAME crashes w/ a Bus Error upon startup after upgrading to Sequoia, 1) update mame.ini so that the line containing gl_lib points to /System/Library/Frameworks/OpenGL.framework/Libraries/libGLVMPlugin.dylib 2) launch w/ DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH="" mame

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Nicolas Christin @nc2y.bsky.social · 09/06/2025

🧵 about a new paper by my amazing students and collaborators. To appear this week at SIGMETRICS. 👇

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Reposted by Nicolas Christin

Carnegie Mellon University @cmu.edu · 06/06/2025

CMU researchers are using personalized models to decode how cancer behaves in individual patients, one of medicine's toughest challenges. Through individualized data and insights, their work revealed hidden #cancer subtypes that could inform treatment and improve survival predictions. #Research

cmu.edu

CMU Researchers Build Personalized Models To Advance Precision Cancer Care

Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science developed a new approach to bridge this gap between available data and actionable insight, creating personalized models to help...

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Nicolas Christin @nc2y.bsky.social · 28/05/2025

Looking for a home for your great scientific result in fintech that is almost all written up and ready to go? The AFT deadline is in less than 24 hours… aftconf.github.io/aft25/index....

aftconf.github.io

Advances in Financial Technologies

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Nicolas Christin @nc2y.bsky.social · 25/05/2025

Jokes aside yeah it seems like this could work.

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Nicolas Christin @nc2y.bsky.social · 25/05/2025

Do you live in England, by any chance?

Nicolas Christin @nc2y.bsky.social · 25/05/2025

Possible? Yes. Putting the contents of a can of sardines in a yoghurt is also possible, from a physics standpoint.

Serge Egelman @v0max.bsky.social · 25/05/2025

Reposted by Nicolas Christin

Pasta sauce cookie is something you should only attempt after you’ve gotten your second Michelin star. Like, David Chang, I’d eat his pasta sauce cookie no questions. Doing it myself because the teevee told me to, yeah, no.

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Eileen Clancy 🧿 @clancyny.bsky.social · 24/05/2025

In NYC, a man was tortured for two weeks for Bitcoin. He escaped. Alice Hutchings @message4bob.bsky.social and colleagues tell us it's happening around the world. Conference paper: "Investigating Wrench Attacks: Physical Attacks: Targeting Cryptocurrency Users" drops.dagstuhl.de/storage/00li...

Investigating Wrench Attacks: Physical Attacks
Targeting Cryptocurrency Users

Marilyne Ordekian #
Department of Computer Science, University College London, UK

Gilberto Atondo-Siu #
Department of Computer Science, University of Cambridge, UK

Alice Hutchings #
Department of Computer Science, University of Cambridge, UK

Marie Vasek #
Department of Computer Science, University College London, UK

Abstract

Cryptocurrency wrench attacks are physical attacks targeting cryptocurrency users in the real world to illegally obtain cryptocurrencies. These attacks significantly undermine the efficacy of existing digital security norms when confronted with real-world threats. We present the first comprehensive
study on wrench attacks. We propose a theoretical approach to defining wrench attacks per criminal law norms, and an interdisciplinary empirical approach to measure their incidence. Leveraging three data sources, we perform crime script analysis, detecting incidents globally across 10 interviews with victims and experts, 146 news articles, and 37 online forums. Our findings reveal diverse groups

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Ben Waber @bwaber.bsky.social · 06/05/2025

Next was an intriguing talk by McKenna McCall on the need to combine formal methods and usable security approaches at @cmus3d.bsky.social www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbnq... (5/7)

youtube.com

Current Topics in Privacy-January 21st 2025-McKenna McCall

YouTube video by Carnegie Mellon Software and Societal Systems Dept

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Reposted by Nicolas Christin

Patrick Park @patpark.bsky.social · 18/05/2025

These talented young musicians teamed up to bring the joy of music to young children in the community. Please support their cause. 6pm (CT) tonight at Nichols Hall, Evanston. Please join us in person or through the live stream. youtube.com/live/MxXwBr_...

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Reposted by Nicolas Christin

Pittsburgh Scanner @pgh-scanner.com · 11/05/2025

Lawrenceville. 44th Street. If you accidentally left your rooster in your locked car, PD is about to break your window.

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Rua M. Williams @fractalecho.bsky.social · 03/05/2025

If you're a grad student or an undergrad interested in research I need to you listen to me very carefully. You cannot learn to write good research papers if you do not read good research papers. Stop asking LLMs to summarize papers for you.

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Steve Rathje @steverathje.bsky.social · 10/04/2025

I'm thrilled to announce that I'll be joining Carnegie Mellon as an Assistant Professor of Human-Computer Interaction (with a courtesy joint appointment in Social and Decision Sciences) in 2026!

Steve Rathje wearing a Carnegie Mellon sweatshirt

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Nicolas Christin @nc2y.bsky.social · 05/04/2025

Does that mean the dog is also graduating? This will not stand.