A ZDNet article How to track a PC anywhere it connects to the Net describes research by UCSD grad student Tadayoshi Kohno that demonstrates how physical devices can be reliably identified remotely using clock skews.

“Anonymous Internet access is now a thing of the past. A doctoral student at the University of California has conclusively fingerprinted computer hardware remotely, allowing it to be tracked wherever it is on the Internet.

In a paper on his research, primary author and Ph.D. student Tadayoshi Kohno said: “There are now a number of powerful techniques for remote operating system fingerprinting, that is, remotely determining the operating systems of devices on the Internet. We push this idea further and introduce the notion of remote physical device fingerprinting … without the fingerprinted device’s known cooperation.”

The potential applications for Kohno’s technique are impressive. For example, “tracking, with some probability, a physical device as it connects to the Internet from different access points, counting the number of devices behind a NAT even when the devices use constant or random IP identifications, remotely probing a block of addresses to determine if the addresses correspond to virtual hosts (for example, as part of a virtual honeynet), and unanonymising anonymised network traces.”

A pre-print of Kohno’s paper is available:

T. Kohno, A. Broidoand and KC Claffy, Remote physical device fingerprinting, 2005 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, Oakland CA, May 8-11, 2005.

“We introduce the area of remote physical device fingerprinting, or fingerprinting a physical device, as opposed to an operating system or class of devices, remotely, and without the fingerprinted device’s known cooperation. We accomplish this goal by exploiting small, microscopic deviations in device hardware: clock skews. Our techniques do not require any modification to the fingerprinted devices. … Further, one can apply our passive and semi-passive techniques when the fingerprinted device is behind a NAT or firewall, and also when the device’s system time is maintained via NTP or SNTP.”

Developing a teleological theory of the mental content (grounded in functionalism) of your web service matchmaker is a sure way to convince your thesis committee that you’re ready to graduate. If you agree, check out the Guide to the Philosophy of Mind — a collection of articles from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy compiled by co-editor David Chalmers. Included are all of SEP’s entries classified under “philosophy of mind” as well as some relevant entries from other areas: philosophy of cognitive science metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language, and philosophy of action.

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The Sixth Annual Trading Agent Competition will be held in June, July, and August of 2005, with the finals during IJCAI on 1-3 August in Edinburgh. The TAC competitions will pit software agents–developed by research groups, students, and others from all over the world–against each other in two challenging market games:

• TAC Classic where agents represent travel coordinators whose goal is to arrange travel packages for clients. These travel packages consist of flights, hotel rooms, and tickets to entertainment events, all of which the agents buy (and, in the case of event tickets, sell) in electronic auctions.
• TAC SCM where agents compete in a dynamic supply chain environment for customer orders and components required for production of these orders. The game captures many of the complexities of actual supply chains, where both demand and supply fluctuates and each manufacturer has a limited production capacity.

The TAC servers and sample agents are available. There will also be a workshop on Trading Agent Analysis and Design at IJCAI.