Talk: At-Compromise Security: The Case for Alert Blindness (CAW 2026)

Rikke gave a talk of our work titled “At-Compromise Security: The Case for Alert Blindness” at the Cryptographic Applications Workshop 2026 in Rome on 10 May. The talk focused on the ethnographic foundations of the work.

Abstract. 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 methodology is ethnography: a careful social science methodology for studying social relations in their contexts. As a first application of this technique, i.e. ethnography in cryptography, we study security at-compromise (neither pre- nor post-) and introduce the security goal of alert blindness. Specifically, in our 2024–2025 six-and-a-half-month ethnographic fieldwork with protesters in Kenya, we observed that alert blindness captures a security goal of abducted persons who were taken by Kenyan security forces for their presumed activism. This talk will draw on the ethnographic work, demonstrating how we can use what we learn from ethnography to establish cryptographic security notions.