Social Foundations of Cryptography

密码学的社会基础

• 批准号: EP/X017524/1
• 负责人: Martin Albrecht
• 金额: $ 92.44万
• 依托单位: King's College London
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Research Grant
• 财政年份: 2024
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2024 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=EP%2FX017524%2F1
• 关键词: Social; Foundations; Cryptography

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.

信息安全最基本的任务是确定我们所说的信息安全是什么意思：我们试图实现的是什么？密码学是信息安全的一个子领域，它在倾向于定义时非常小心。事实上，为密码原语或协议找到正确的安全定义是密码工作的关键部分。然而，这些安全概念-以及依赖于这些概念的一切-并非存在于真空之中。虽然密码学的直接对象不是社会关系，但它假设并模拟了它们。这一事实在密码学著作的介绍中很容易得到承认，作者通过引用一些社会情况来说明他们提出的结构的实用性，其中几方有冲突的目的，但需要或希望进行交互。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学界的严格关注。更广泛的社会科学提供了丰富的方法来回答有关社会情境、关系、（集体）需求、想象力和欲望的问题。然而，它们通常被降级为信息安全中的服务角色，例如在设计好现有安全技术后对其进行可用性测试。相比之下，在这个项目中，我们要求社会科学为技术建立核心概念。为了确定社会环境中的安全意味着什么-为了识别和理解安全问题-一种有希望获得深刻而详细的见解的方法脱颖而出：人种学。人种学在“挖掘（研究中的）群体认为理所当然的东西”方面具有独特的地位。让那些依赖安全技术的人参与进来的一个关键挑战是，他们不是训练有素的信息安全专业人员。他们不知道，事实上也不需要知道，例如，保密性要求完整性，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，以及如果要求，密码学可以提供什么保证。因此，准确地知道什么是理所当然的，或把否则，预期或期望，在社会交往，社会和技术协议，事实上，密码学是至关重要的import.Some更常见的依赖于社会科学的方法在信息安全，虽然更实用，更少的时间消耗比人种学，因此在这种情况下不太合适的研究方法。例如，问题单和调查，无论是定性的还是定量的，在这里都是有限的调查手段。虽然访谈提供了一些更深入参与的机会，但民族志使我们能够了解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，民族志揭示了所研究群体内“为社会行动提供蓝图的知识和意义结构”。民族志调查的探索性，植根于实地工作与它的目的是了解组，因此，在解锁个人和集体的安全需求和做法的理解的关键使能因素。民族志固有的自反性和嵌入性使这种见解成为可能。在这个项目中，我们采用这种方法来大规模抗议活动的具体例子设置。一方面，这些提供了丰富多样的设置，其中安全需求是至关重要的，同时也与标准的加密用例（例如电子商务）有足够的不同，以保证新颖的见解。根据我们的民族志研究结果，我们将研究现有的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，以满足这些确定的需求。