Supervision

This page lists projects I currently supervise. Students that finished their projects and graduated are listed on the page of supervised theses. A LaTeX template for OU theses has been kindly provided by Annet Vink and Katleen de Nil (based on the work by Niels Tielenburg).

Master and bachelor theses projects

• Measuring in-app behavioural advertising in children's apps, master project (OU).
  Eric van der Helm.
  

  Many apps created specifically for children are free. They generate income for their creators by displaying advertisements. There are strict rules for advertising to children (Children's Online Privacy Protection Act in the USA, Digital Services Act in EU). Both of these prohibit tracking children online. This should rule out behavioural advertising. The core idea of this project is to use real-world devices, and automate interaction (e.g., using the method developed by Meesters in his thesis) to check why advertisements in children's apps are shown.

• Injecting choices to gauge compliance, bachelor project (OU).
  Dirk Donkers.

  Cookie dialogs have become rampant, but whether they are compliant with privacy regulations is questionable. Various mechanisms have been used to study this question. One promising method, initially explored by Lendering, is to create the consent-cookie instead of manipulating the cookie dialog. This allows for testing abnormal conditions (allowing all purposes but no vendors, etc.). The goal of this project is to find a way to apply this method at significant scale, so as to enable testing various aspects of cookie compliance automatically.

• Investigating password rules in the wild, master project (OU).
  Coen van Driel

  Passwords are by far the most widespread means of authentication in the digital world. However, weak passwords constitute a security risk. Therefore, apps and websites can enforce rules to make sure users use strong(er) passwords. The goal of this project is to investigate what types of rules are enforced in the wild, and whether the enforcement happens on the client-side only, or on both client- and server-side.

• Measuring effect of obfuscation on smart contracts, master project (OU).
  Martin Broers

  Smart contracts are, by nature, publicly available. Obfuscation have been used (e.g., by CryptoKitties) to prevent others from easily reverse-engineering the smart contract. There are various obfuscation techniques that may be applied to smart contracts. It is not clear whether all of these increase the costs of execution in any given situation -- it is even possible that in some cases, obfuscation may help reduce execution costs. The goal of this project is to implement several obfuscation techniques, apply them to a large set of smart contracts and measure the effects of obfuscation (in terms of execution costs as well as code size and other relevant metrics).

• Detecting Dark Patterns in Cookie Dialogs, bachelor project (OU).
  Robin Jansz

  So-called "dark patterns" are tricks in the user interface, to nudge users towards or away from options. This project will investigate the use of dark patterns in online cookie dialogs. The goal is to build a dark pattern detector and test it on websites within the EU.