Light Blue Touchpaper » Privacy technology

Britain’s National Crime Agency has spent the last five years trying to undermine encryption, saying it might stop them arresting hundreds of men every month for downloading indecent images of ...

https://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2023/12/14/grasping-at-straw/

Everyone’s worried that the UK Online Safety Bill and the EU Child Sex Abuse Regulation will put an end to end-to-end encryption. But might a law already passed by the EU have the same effect? ...

https://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2023/03/24/interop-one-protocol-to-rule-them-all/

A number of governments are trying to mandate surveillance software in devices that support end-to-end encrypted chat; the EU’s CSA Regulation and the UK’s Online Safety bill being two promin...

https://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2023/02/27/bugs-still-considered-harmful/

I’m hiring a Research Assistant/Associate to work on the EPSRC-funded Adaptive PETs to Protect & emPower People during Life Transitions (AP4L) project. The project is being undertaken with the ...

https://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2022/12/16/hiring-for-ap4l/

Today I publish a detailed rebuttal to the argument from the intelligence community that we need to break end-to-end encryption in order to protect children. This has led in the UK to the Online ...

https://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2022/10/13/chatcontrol-or-child-protection/

Whistleblowing is dangerous business. Whistleblowers face grave consequences if they’re caught and, to make matters worse, the anonymity set – the set of potential whistleblowers for a given ...

https://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2022/03/11/coverdrop-securing-initial-contact-for-whistleblowers/

This week sees the start of a course on security engineering that Sam Ainsworth and I are teaching. It’s based on the third edition of my Security Engineering book, and is a first cut at a ‘f...

https://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2022/01/19/security-engineering-course/

End-to-end (E2E) encryption is now widely deployed in messaging apps such as WhatsApp and Signal and billions of people around the world have the contents of their message protected against stron...

https://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2021/11/09/rollercoaster-communicating-efficiently-and-anonymously-in-large-groups/

In August, Apple announced a system to check all our iPhones for illegal images, then delayed its launch after widespread pushback. Yet some governments continue to press for just such a surveill...

https://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2021/10/15/bugs-in-our-pockets/

Apple stunned the tech industry on Thursday by announcing that the next version of iOS and macOS will contain a neural network to scan photos for sex abuse. Each photo will get an encrypted ‘sa...

https://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2021/08/08/is-apples-neuralmatch-searching-for-abuse-or-for-people/