Selling Cookies

Context Cookies

In an ambient intelligence world, devices work in order to support people carrying out their everyday life activities in a natural way. Therefore, it is necessary to know the entities in the environment and to consider new interaction schemas with them. This paper proposes an autonomous and lively mechanism to refresh the context information while users interact with the environment using Near ...

Selling Information Selling Information *

We study a dynamic buyer-seller problem in which the good is information and there are no property rights. The potential buyer is reluctant to pay for information whose value to him is uncertain, but the seller cannot credibly convey its value to the buyer without disclosing the information itself. Information comes as divisible hard evidence. We show how and why the seller can appropriate a su...

Internet Cookies: Security Implications

Flash Cookies and Privacy

This is a pilot study of the use of “Flash cookies” by popular websites. We find that more than 50% of the sites in our sample are using Flash cookies to store information about the user. Some are using it to “respawn” or re-instantiate HTTP cookies deleted by the user. Flash cookies often share the same values as HTTP cookies, and are even used on government websites to assign unique values to...

Hardened Stateless Session Cookies

Stateless session cookies allow web applications to alter their behaviour based on user preferences and access rights, without maintaining server-side state for each session. This is desirable because it reduces the impact of denial of service attacks and eases database replication issues in load-balanced environments. The security of existing session cookie proposals depends on the server prot...