Cryptographic Tools for Advancing Civil Liberties and Human Rights in the Digital Age

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The Internet is a dangerous place. As the proportion of our day-to-day activities that occur online continues to grow, so too does our exposure to online privacy threats imposed by fraudsters and identity thieves, by unscrupulous marketers, by oppressive governments, and by countless unknown and unknowable others. The implications for privacy are huge: recent headlines have been dominated by news of massive data breaches, by revelations of dragnet surveillance by the NSA and other “Five Eyes” intelligence agencies, and, most recently, by investigations and speculation around precision-targeted disinformation campaigns wherein hostile foreign powers weaponize the personal information of our citizenry to manipulate and sow discord in our democratic processes.******The proposed research program focuses on the intersection between applied cryptography and computer systems security. It leverages ideas from cryptography to build secure systems and tools that empower users with control over the collection, dissemination, and use of information about themselves; their beliefs, interests, and affiliations; and their day-to-day activities. This includes research all the way from low-level cryptographic primitives and their mathematical underpinnings through to the design, implementation, and deployment of the full-fledged systemsthe privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs)built from those primitives.******The long-term goal of the program is to generate conceptual frameworks, cryptographic tools, and concrete systems to aid in realizing the early vision of the Internet as a “great democratizer and equalizer”. To this end, my team will design and work to deploy innovative privacy-enhancing cryptographic primitives and PETs that help to protector even advancenot only the privacy rights of their users but also the fundamental rights of people across the globe. As three shorter-term objectives towards the above overarching goal, this proposal identifies the development of new cryptographic primitives and protocols for (i) concealing both the content and metadata of Internet communications, (ii) hiding the very existence of sensitive data stored on digital media, and (iii) disseminating information in ways that either limit censors' abilities to suppress it or, at the very least, forces such suppression to happen transparently.******Positive results in any aspect of this program will have positive impacts far beyond the scientific advances it seeks to contribute both from an educational and outreach standpoint and from an industrial and societal standpoint. Specifically, the theoretical component will advance the state of scientific knowledge regarding cryptography and PETs, while the practical component will help alleviate important societal problems arising from both deployed and up-and-coming technologies and thereby provide concrete benefits to Internet users and human rights activists in Canada and around the world.