The NDSS symposium fostered information exchange among researchers and practitioners of network and distributed system security. The target audience included those interested in practical aspects of network and distributed system security, with a focus on actual system design and implementation. A major goal was to encourage and enable the Internet community to apply, deploy, and advance the state of available network and distributed systems security technology.

Dr. Sotiris Ioannidis presented the results of a large-scale analysis of open HTTP proxies, focusing on determining the extent to which user traffic is manipulated while being relayed. The study revealed incentives of publicly available web proxies and raised several concerns due to multiple cases where users can be severely affected by connecting to an open proxy. To mitigate the threat, FORTH built a service that collects and probes public proxies automatically and generates a list of safe proxies that do not perform any content modification.

For SMESEC, the conference offered the opportunity to present the cybersecurity expertise of the consortium and obtain feedback from a community of experts. The in-depth knowledge of attacks helps to design effective tools for thorough protection.

More information: https://www.internetsociety.org/events/ndss/2018/