Talk: At-Compromise Security: The Case for Alert Blindness (Security in Times of Surveillance 2026)

Martin and Rikke will present our work titled “At-Compromise Security: The Case for Alert Blindness” at the one-day event Security in Times of Surveillance 2026 held at the Technische Universiteit Eindhoven on 26 June. The event is organised by the Eindhoven Institute for the Protection of Systems and Information (Ei/PSI).

Abstract. We start from the observation in prior work 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 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. We show this notion is achievable under standard assumptions by providing a construction secure in our model. We discussed both the notion and the construction with some interlocutors in Kenya.