Biblio

Schools in the developing world frequently do not have high bandwidth or reliable connections, limiting their access to web content. As a result, schools are increasingly turning to Offline Educational Resources (OERs), employing purpose-built local hardware to serve content. These approaches can be expensive and difficult to maintain in resource-constrained settings. We present Siskin, an alternative approach that leverages the ubiquity of web browsers to provide a distributed content access cache between user devices on the local network. We demonstrate that this system allows access to web pages offline by identifying the browser as a ubiquitous platform. We build and evaluate a prototype, showing that existing web protocols and infrastructure can be leveraged to create a powerful content cache over a local network.

Digital money drives modern economies, and the global adoption of mobile phones has enabled a wide range of digital financial services in the developing world. Where there is money, there must be security, yet prior work on mobile money has identified discouraging vulnerabilities in the current ecosystem. We begin by arguing that the situation is not as dire as it may seem–-many reported issues can be resolved by security best practices and updated mobile software. To support this argument, we diagnose the problems from two directions: (1) a large-scale analysis of existing financial service products and (2) a series of interviews with 7 developers and designers in Africa and South America. We frame this assessment within a novel, systematic threat model. In our large-scale analysis, we evaluate 197 Android apps and take a deeper look at 71 products to assess specific organizational practices. We conclude that although attack vectors are present in many apps, service providers are generally making intentional, security-conscious decisions. The developer interviews support these findings, as most participants demonstrated technical competency and experience, and all worked within established organizations with regimented code review processes and dedicated security teams.