Nicolas Christin

@[email protected]
243 Followers
88 Following
101 Posts
Prof. at Carnegie Mellon University. Computer & network security, security economics, and online crime. Economic migrant.
🌎Pittsburgh, PA (mostly)
🕸https://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/nicolasc
Nicolas ChristinApr 14
Show threadJessamynApr 14
@nc2y Wow, yeah I also work in a library helping older adults with technology and I very much see a lot of the behavior your student describes. People who have a hard time with password managers, people who have a hard time with pen/paper password managers, people who don't totally understand how 2FA will work if they're not specifically around. These are good suggestions at the end and some of them just need to get the eye of people who can make decisions. Thanks for sharing it.
Nicolas ChristinApr 14
Show threadJessamynApr 14

@nc2y Oh thanks for this, just downloaded it to read. I work for the Flickr Foundation which built a funny little tool for downloading one's own Flickr archives (or one for which you have permission) along with social context (comments faves, whatever). Our researcher wrote a report on The State of Social Media Archiving Tools and... surprisingly, it's something which is hard to do.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yiQTbyhq4NZ3xR7F1m3qpX4dn82hkL5sEkhkBuW1ZlU/edit?usp=sharing

The State of Social Media Archiving Tools

The State of Social Media Archiving Tools A Report from Flickr Foundation Research Overview: This report systematically reviews social media archiving tools, focusing primarily on platform download tools. We hypothesize that most tools were designed for GDPR compliance rather than long-term pr...

Google Docs
Show threadNicolas ChristinApr 14
Anyway, I digress. Read Jenny's paper. It's illuminating. Older people are far from being digitally illiterate, and we are not serving their needs well at the moment. And we have to fix this, sooner rather than later. (5/5)
Show threadNicolas ChristinApr 14
A lot of us have completely moved all asset management online. I haven't been to my bank since 2005. Yet, a lot of estate planning does not account for, or even reflect that new reality. (4/5)
Show threadNicolas ChristinApr 14
There is a growing need for estate planners with digital literacy. Shockingly, this is more often than not an afterthought. With GenXers/Xennials starting to get gray, there is -- in my opinion -- a real need here. (3/5)
Show threadNicolas ChristinApr 14
Grossly simplifying: key finding is that older individual don't really care about their purely digital assets (pictures, etc). They do care about digital artifacts (e.g., email, etc) that could make it harder for their heirs to manage estate transmission. (2/5)
Nicolas ChristinApr 14
My student Jenny Tang just presented our work at #chi26. We have been interested in post-mortem management of online accounts (1/5)
https://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/nicolasc/publications/Tang-CHI26.pdf
Nicolas ChristinOct 20, 2025

Last week my student Ally Nisenoff published "Exploiting the Shared Storage API" at ACM CCS: https://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/nicolasc/publications/Nisenoff-CCS25.pdf
3 days later, Google announced they're abandoning Shared Storage:
https://privacysandbox.com/news/update-on-plans-for-privacy-sandbox-technologies/

(Correlation doesn't imply causation. Interesting, though.)

Nicolas ChristinSep 11, 2025
We're hosting the 7th intl' conf. on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT'25) at Carnegie Mellon on Oct. 8-10. Join us to hear about the latest exciting developments in crypto research. Registration closes on Sept 16!
https://advfintech.org/aft25/attend.html
(Program: https://advfintech.org/aft25/program.html)
Advances in Financial Technologies

Nicolas ChristinSep 3, 2025
This is concerning, it seems like lower fees on Ethereum are facilitating address poisoning attacks… https://x.com/toxin_tagger/status/1963220194186178733
Toxin Tagger (T-T) (@toxin_tagger) on X

🚨Warning🚨: There was a surge in the number of poisoning attacks on Ethereum, potentially due to the lower transaction fees. Figures: Daily number of poisoning transfers in August 2025 for Ethereum and BSC.

X (formerly Twitter)