Social Foundations of Cryptography

信息安全中最基本的任务是确定我们所说的信息是安全的是什么意思：我们试图实现的是什么？信息安全中非常注意其定义的一个子领域是密码学。事实上，为加密原语或协议找到正确的安全定义是加密工作的关键部分。然而，这些安全概念--以及一切依赖于它们的东西--并不存在于真空中。虽然密码学的直接对象不是社会关系，但它假定社会关系并对其进行建模。这一事实在密码作品的引言中很容易得到承认，其中作者通过参考一些社会情况来说明他们所建议的构造的实用性，其中几个当事人的目的相互冲突，但需要或希望相互作用。然而，这部分定义工作并没有像复杂性理论和数学问题那样受到密码界的严格要求。更广泛的社会科学提供了丰富的方法来回答关于社会状况、关系、(集体)需求、想象和欲望的问题。然而，它们往往被降级为信息安全中的服务角色，例如在现有安全技术设计完成后执行可用性测试。相比之下，在这个项目中，我们要求社会科学建立技术的核心概念。为了在社会环境中确定安全意味着什么--识别和理解安全问题--有一种方法在承诺深刻而详细的洞察方面脱颖而出：民族志。民族志具有独特的地位，可以“挖掘(正在研究的)群体认为理所当然的东西”。吸引那些依赖安全技术的人的一个关键挑战是，他们不是训练有素的信息安全专业人员。他们不知道，实际上也不应该知道，例如，机密性要求完整性，现有的入职做法可以用信息安全的语言来表述，不同的安全概念不能同时实现，如果被要求，例如密码学，可以提供什么保证。因此，准确地知道在社会互动、社会和技术协议，甚至密码学中，什么是理所当然的、期望的或期望的，是至关重要的。在信息安全中，一些更常见的依赖社会科学方法，虽然比人种学更实用，耗时更少，但在这种情况下不太适合研究方法。例如，问卷和调查，无论是定性的还是定量的，在这里都是有限的调查手段。虽然访谈为更深入的参与提供了一些机会，但民族志让我们了解到人们不了解自己的东西。通过对日常活动和关系的密切观察和分析，民族志揭示了被研究群体中为社会行动提供蓝图的知识和意义结构。人种学调查的探索性植根于其旨在了解的群体的实地工作，因此是了解个人和集体安全需要和做法的关键推动因素。在这个项目中，我们将这种方法应用到大规模抗议活动的具体实例设置中。一方面，它们提供了丰富多样的环境，其中安全需求是至高无上的，同时也与标准的加密用例(例如在电子商务中)有很大的不同，从而有望获得新的见解。基于我们的人种学发现，我们将研究现有技术是否满足确定的安全需求，并将设计新的加密概念和解决方案来满足这些确定的需求。

The most fundamental task in information security is to establish what we mean by saying that information is secure: what is it that we are trying to achieve?One subfield of information security that takes great care in tending to its definitions is cryptography. Indeed, finding the correct security definition for a cryptographic primitive or protocol is a critical part of cryptographic work. However, these security notions -- and everything that depends on them -- do not exist in a vacuum. While the immediate objects of cryptography are not social relations, it presumes and models them. This fact is readily acknowledged in the introductions of cryptographic works where authors illustrate the utility of their proposed constructions by reference to some social situation where several parties have conflicting ends but a need or desire to interact. Yet, this part of the definitional work has not received the same rigour from the cryptographic community as complexity-theoretic and mathematical questions.The broader social sciences offer a wealth of approaches to answering questions about social situations, relations, (collective) needs, imaginations and desires. However, they are often relegated to a service role in information security, e.g. to perform usability testing of existing security technologies after those have been designed. In contrast, in this project we ask social science to establish core notions for technology. To establish what security means within social settings -- to identify and understand security concerns -- one approach stands out in promising deep and detailed insights: ethnography.Ethnography is uniquely placed to "unearth what the group (under study) takes for granted". A key challenge in engaging those who depend on security technology is that they are not trained information security professionals. They do not know and, indeed, should not need to know, for example, that confidentiality requires integrity, that existing onboarding practices can be phrased in the language of information security, which different security notions cannot be achieved simultaneously and what guarantees, say, cryptography, can give if asked. Therefore, to know exactly what is taken for granted, or put otherwise, expected or desired, in social interactions, social and technical protocols and, indeed, cryptography is of critical import.Some more commonly relied upon social science methods in information security, while much more practical and less time consuming than ethnography, are therefore less suitable research approaches in this context. For example, questionnaires and surveys, both the qualitative and quantitative kind, are limited means of inquiry here. While interviews provide some opportunity for deeper engagement, ethnography allows us to learn that which people do not know themselves. Through close observations and analysis of everyday activities and relations, ethnography reveals "the knowledge and meaning structures that provide the blueprint for social action" within the group under study. The exploratory nature of ethnographic inquiry, rooted in fieldwork with the group it aims to understand, is thus a key enabler in unlocking an understanding of individual and collective security needs and practices. The inherently reflexive and embedded nature of ethnography enables such insights.In this project we adopt this approach to the specific example settings of large-scale protests. These, on the one hand, offer rich and diverse settings where security needs are paramount, while also being sufficiently different from standard cryptographic use-cases (e.g. in e-commerce) to promise novel insights. Based on our ethnographic findings, we will study existing technologies on whether they satisfy the security needs identified and will design novel cryptographic notions and solutions to satisfy these identified needs.