In most democratic societies, each individual is legally able to expect a certain amount of privacy unless they surrender it, or unless there is some compelling legal reason for authorities to intrude on that privacy. Each individual is also able to expect that if someone else in their society causes them harm, this other person can be identified and held accountable for their actions. In modern society, many techniques and tools have been developed to support individual identification and accountability. On the Internet, however, the situation is vastly different. There is currently no legal or technological guarantee of privacy for users, and there exist few tools that allow authorities to identify attackers and hold them accountable for their actions.
Users are dependent on their technological skills to preserve what privacy they can.
Most users lack these skills, and can be easily tracked as they traverse different web sites. At the same time, technically-able users, most notably network attackers, are able to hide their individual identities by obscuring the IP address of the host they use for communication. This makes it difficult or impossible to identify individuals accountable for network crime or fraud. In this talk I will give an overview of past and ongoing research that supports correcting this imbalance - allowing determination of the source of network attacks and fraud while promoting and providing individual privacy. Clay got an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from the University of Virginia, then joined the U.S. Army.