Talk: At-Compromise Security: The Case for Alert Blindness

We will present our upcoming work titled “At-Compromise Security: The Case for Alert Blindness” at the upcoming UK Crypto Day in Manchester on 11 September.

Abstract. We start from the observation (Blanchette’12) that cryptography broadly intuits security goals – as modelled in games or ideal functionalities – while claiming realism. This stands in contrast to cryptography’s attentive approach towards examining assumptions and constructions through cryptanalysis and reductions. To close this gap, we introduce a technique for determining security goals. Given that games and ideal functionalities model specific social relations between various honest and adversarial parties, our approach is grounded in a careful social science methodology for studying social relations in their contexts: ethnography. As a first application of this technique, we study security at-compromise (neither pre- nor post-) and introduce the security goal of alert blindness. Specifically, as observed in our 2024/2025 ethnographic fieldwork with protesters in Kenya, alert blindness captures a security goal of abducted persons who were taken by Kenyan security forces for their presumed activism. It may have applications elsewhere.