DESE SEMINAR
Founded in 2011, Silk Road was the first online anonymous marketplace,
in which buyers and sellers could transact with anonymity guarantees
far superior to those available in online or offline alternatives,
thanks to the innovative use of cryptocurrencies and network
anonymization. Business on Silk Road, primarily involving narcotics
trafficking, was brisk and before long competitors appeared. After
Silk Road was taken down by law enforcement, a dynamic ecosystem of
online anonymous marketplaces emerged. That ecosystem is highly
active, to this day, and has been surprisingly resilient to multiple
law enforcement take down operations as well as "exit scams," in which
the operators of a marketplace abruptly abscond with any money left on
the platform.
I will describe insights gained from eight years of active measurement
of the online anonymous market ecosystem. More precisely, I will
highlight the scientific challenges in collecting such data at scale.
I will discuss how overall revenues have steadily grown year after
year, and describe the leading types of commerce taking place on these
markets. I will then focus on the role online anonymous markets play
in cybercrime commoditization. Last, I will explain our efforts on
matching a priori disparate vendor handles to unique individuals, and
on detecting impersonation attacks. This will help me introduce some
of the research avenues we are currently pursuing.
Bio:
Nicolas Christin is an Associate Research Professor at Carnegie Mellon
University, jointly appointed in Engineering and Public Policy and in
the School of Computer Science. He is affiliated with the Institute
for Software Research, and a core faculty in CyLab, the
university-wide information security institute. He also has courtesy
appointments in the Information Networking Institute and the
department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He holds a Diplôme
d'Ingénieur from École Centrale Lille, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in
Computer Science from the University of Virginia. He was a researcher
in the School of Information at the University of California,
Berkeley, prior to joining Carnegie Mellon in 2005. His research
interests are in computer and information systems security. Most of
his work is at the boundary of measurements, systems and policy
research. He has most recently focused on security analytics, online
crime modeling, and economic and human aspects of computer security.
His group's research won several awards including Honorable Mention at
ACM CHI 2011 and 2016, Best Student Paper Award at USENIX Security
2014, Best Paper Award at USENIX Security 2016 and ACM CHI 2017, the
2018 IEEE Cybersecurity Award for Practice, and a 2019 Carnegie
Institute of Technology Dean Early Career Fellowship.