Universally composable end-to-end secure messaging

CNS-1718135 - National Science Foundation; CNS-1801564 - National Science Foundation; CNS-1931714 - National Science Foundation; CNS-1915763 - National Science Foundation; HR00112020021 - Department of Defense/DARPA; 000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000037211 - SRI Internationalhttps://eprint.iacr.org/2022/376.pdfAccepted manuscrip

Towards secure computation for people

My research investigates three questions: How do we customize protocols and implementations to account for the unique requirement of each setting and its target community, what are necessary steps that we can take to transition secure computation tools into practice, and how can we promote their adoption for users at large? In this dissertation I present several of my works that address these three questions with a particular focus on one of them. First my work on "Hecate: Abuse Reporting in Secure Messengers with Sealed Sender" designs a customized protocol to protect people from abuse and surveillance in online end to end encrypted messaging. Our key insight is to add pre-processing to asymmetric message franking, where the moderating entity can generate batches of tokens per user during off-peak hours that can later be deposited when reporting abuse. This thesis then demonstrates that by carefully tailoring our cryptographic protocols for real world use cases, we can achieve orders of magnitude improvements over prior works with minimal assumptions over the resources available to people. Second, my work on "Batched Differentially Private Information Retrieval" contributes a novel Private Information Retrieval (PIR) protocol called DP-PIR that is designed to provide high throughput at high query rates. It does so by pushing all public key operations into an offline stage, batching queries from multiple clients via techniques similar to mixnets, and maintain differential privacy guarantees over the access patterns of the database. Finally, I provide three case studies showing that we cannot hope to further the adoption of cryptographic tools in practice without collaborating with the very people we are trying to protect. I discuss a pilot deployment of secure multi-party computation (MPC) that I have done with the Department of Education, deployments of MPC I have done for the Boston Women’s Workforce Council and the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, and ongoing work in developing tool chain support for MPC via an automated resource estimation tool called Carousels

Showing what we see: psychoanalytic vision, transparency, and linguistic pragmatics

This dissertation explores the possibilities that pragmatic linguistic analytic methods might have for psychoanalysis, both in the latter\u27s attempts to establish itself as an empirically grounded endeavor and in its understanding of its own theoretical constructs. I begin with a discussion of some of the troubles psychoanalysis has had in legitimizing itself in the eyes of its peers since in inception, suggesting that a closer relationship with already-established sociolinguistic sciences (i.e. pragmatic analysis of linguistic interaction) may aid in its promotion. I then describe how these methods have already been taken up within the field of psychology in the study of therapy process, noting a gap in the research such that they have yet to be brought to bear on the analysis of psychoanalytic constructs. I discuss some theoretical overlaps that already exist between psychoanalytic theory and the linguistic philosopher John Austin (namely critiques of modern subjectivity and the function of language) and give examples of possible conceptual intersections that might be further expanded in the future. I discuss repression and projective identification as two such possibilities. I conclude with some of the implications and limitations of this dialogue, noting that a pragmatic perspective might be better suited to interpersonal theories of psychoanalysis. I discuss the hegemonizing risk inherent in the metaphor of vision. I also address in what way linguistic pragmatic methods--and a psychoanalytic theory that centers itself around the construct of unconscious intention--can in the end be said to be empirical. While these problems are not likely be solved in the near future, a continued discussion of them, stemming from viewing psychoanalytic constructs through a pragmatic lens, will nonetheless be fruitful

Patriotic hackers

Patriotic hackers are a group who have not been widely studied. However, their presence in cyberspace during a conflict or crisis escalates matters and can have harmful consequences. Together with their use of advanced cyber weapons, the implications of their actions need to be better recognised and understood. Utilising current academic and non-academic literature, alongside interviews with industry experts and the author’s own field diary, this study aimed to critically evaluate the current use of patriotic hackers. In conclusion, contributions to both theory and practice have been made. A theoretical model for patriotic hacking has been developed to aid further research. The advice offered to organisations is not to waste resources preparing for a patriotic hacker attack but rather to work with governments to more effectively respond. Additionally, it is recommended that new, international treaties are required to discourage the use of patriotic hackers, and to attempt to prevent cyber weapon proliferation. Such treaties are required to prevent escalation during crises and to secure the advantages that cyberspace offers to society

"Both diligent and secret": the intelligence letters of William Herle

PhDThe unpublished letters of William Herle, diplomat and intelligencer to the court of Elizabeth I reveal startling insights into the role of such agents in political affairs. As well as their more obvious content of sensitive information, Herle's letters expose his primary impetus behind the pursuit of intelligence; of the construction and maintenance of a patronage alliance based upon the judicious exchange and release of knowledge at politically sensitive moments. This epistolary aspect of intelligence letters - overlooked by much scholarship - reveals the complex strategies Herle implements to circumvent the disruption of social hierarchy at the moment of counsel, the private transfer of knowledge in a medium often subject to broadcast, and the uncomfortable union of potent intelligence and familiar affect. This dissertation investigates the world of Elizabethan intelligence operations as experienced by William Herle, focusing on the topics of religion, early modern diplomacy, imprisonment, secret communication and patronage relationships based upon intelligence-exchange. The letters are an invaluable resource for scholars of early modern history and sixteenth-century letter writing, documenting the lengths to which a client would go to secure and maintain patronage in this period, encompassing the giving of gifts, the transmitting of books, and the strategic deployment of potent information. Scrutinizing intelligence operations from a social and textual standpoint offers the scholar a wider picture of the agent's position and relation to the political landscape. This dissertation examines Herle's evolving status of common informant, prison spy, diplomatic envoy, and special ambassador, surmounting obstacles of social hierarchy whilst maintaining a marginal, secret status. By identifying the epistolary and social minutiae of Herle's letters, this study relocates the position of the Elizabethan intelligencer, departing from the typical notion of skulking spy and instead positioning the agent directly in contact, both textual and physical, with the political power-base

Wax works: Hairlessness, infrastructure, and the air that we breathe

Working across urban sociology and critical beauty studies, this thesis examines the materials, spaces, infrastructures, and embodied forms of labour which effect the production of ‘feminine’ bodies in London’s beauty salons. Interrelatedly, it explores the toxic harms imbricated in this beauty work. Given the increasing ubiquity of extended hairlessness for a ‘feminine’ appearance, the thesis focuses on the journey of depilatory wax to and through the beauty salon and on how wax works. In particular, the role of oil is underscored: as a key raw material which affords the product and its packaging certain ways of performing; as powering the wax’s diesel-fuelled journey to the salon; and as enabling its easy disposability and replacement. The thesis also considers the spaces upon which this work is predicated: salons but also ports, wholesalers’ warehouses and stores, light industrial estates, and waste facilities, and the road networks and waterways which connect these. Following wax and other beauty products across London, the materials and places necessary for beauty work to actually happen are put into relief. As are the forms of potential toxicity which are co-extensive with beauty practices, for the products’ application in the salons, the journeys they make through the city, and what is released as they are incinerated are replete with petroleum-originated emissions. Taking materials, places, and bodies to be in de/generative interchanges, the toxic harms are epitomised in the air that ‘we’ breathe where vulnerability to these is patterned by intersecting structural disadvantages. Petro-permeated air circulates through spaces and into lungs and is inhaled and metabolised on starkly different terms. Drawing these together, the thesis argues that the production of ‘feminine’ bodies in the beauty salon is materially and spatially effected, heavily permeated by oil, and inseparably entangled with unevenly distributed toxic harms

Going Viral: A Critical, Post-Structural Exploration of Feminist Culture Jamming As Cultural Therapeutic

Using a discursive framework informed by critical theory and post-structural philosophy (particularly via the works of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler), this dissertation proposes the existence of pathology at both individual and cultural levels. Shifting away from the language of social problems, I propose that the pervasive and harmful ideology of patriarchy promulgated through discourse constitutes not just a problem, but a cultural sickness. Calling for a revised understanding of the relationship between culture and individual, and a new respect for the powerfully constitutive role of discourse, I argue that many of the common symptom patterns and problems we treat women for – in particular, eating disorders, and certain kinds of depression, and anxiety – are not really individual, but social in etiology, and may require social treatment in order to truly shift. In order to affect lasting change in the lives of our patients, as well as stem the creation of patients, I argue that we must work not only at the individual level – which may risk colluding with damaging social forces, or reinforcing via the structural format of individual therapy that the patient is solely responsible for her problems – but deliver therapeutics to the culture as well. In this dissertation, I offer up feminist culture jamming – an activist practice of taking over mainstream media outlets such as magazines, billboards, or websites, and using them to promote atypical, feminist messages – as an example of a potential cultural therapeutic. Analyzing the work of six feminist culture jammers (and a selection of online response data) via a method of deconstructive hermeneutics, I demonstrate how systemic sexism, silencing, and a sense of inevitability continue to pervade many women\u27s experiences living in the contemporary United States. I also show how culture jamming offers a way for women to take action against a damaging culture, effect changes in the discourse, see alternative possibilities, and connect with each other, and argue that these elements are not only culturally, but also individually healing. I assert that culture jamming may be a particularly effective cultural therapeutic, not only because of its capacity to help women act, connect, and impact discourse, but because it functions in a number of unique ways. Likening culture jamming to a virus, I illustrate how culture jamming subverts damaging normative social discourses from within by appearing in the everyday space, disguising itself in everyday packaging, reaching massive audiences, and empowering audience members to further action. Finally, I conclude with suggestions for how clinicians might be informed by the practice of culture jamming, including a renewed respect for the microtraumatic effect living in a patriarchal culture may have on female patients, and a recognition of cultural pathology and the need for cultural therapeutics. I offer specific insights from cultural psychologists such as Cushman, Hillman, and Sipiora as to how might clinicians make room for the socio-cultural world in their practice as healers, and emphasize the common goals – though different means – of culture jammers and psychotherapists

"Many Secrets Are Told Around Horses:" An Ethnographic Study of Equine-Assisted Psychotherapy

This dissertation presents an ethnography of equine-assisted psychotherapy (EAP) based on nine months of fieldwork at "Equine Healers," a non-profit organization in central Colorado that specialized in various therapeutic modalities associated with EAP. In bridging scholarly work around animals, a literature suffused with the notion of "companion species," as well as scholarly work around psychotherapy, and most especially the idea of "psychotherapy as conversation," the connective conflict these two interests share, and from which this dissertation emerges, is over questions of language and communication. Specifically, the overarching problem that this dissertation addresses is: what counts as talking, in the context of "the talking cure," when beings that do not share human language are necessarily implicated in human conversations. Beginning with Das' (1997) encouragement to understand "pain as the beginning of a language game," most of this dissertation will therefore be about dropping the reader into the silences between the humans and the horses, and between the words the humans use to talk about their experiences with the horses, thereby raising fundamental questions about the communicational dialectics that can transform human experiences. I argue that anthropologists must re-arrange our analytical frames around humans and animals, beginning with how we understand language, in the context of communication, to be organized. Rather than privileging subjects and objects, I suggest returning to Bateson (1972) and attempting to privilege relationships. To explore these ideas, this dissertation will attend to a particular therapeutic modality employed at Equine Healers, a set of practices called a "group sculpture." To set up and make it possible to appreciate the complexity of this modality, this dissertation will first consider framing conversations among humans and horses as rhythmically ordered interactions. To do this, I generate a model of conversation based less on grammatical rules derived from the use of words, or the possibilities offered by subject-object "thing" relationships, and instead lean on musical relationships of rhythm. Initially emerging through conversation, I then trace out rhythms carried between horses and humans by particular physical, material pieces of their world. These brushes, clickers, and bridles ultimately bridge vocal and pneumatic rhythms; and it is movement along this connection, an ebb and flow of voice and breath that, in aligning, generate opportunities for iconic relationships with one's self

Unfolding Imagos: an inquiry into the aesthetics of Action-Phenomenology

In modern civilisation, magic in its instrumental (sorcerous) sense would appear to have been completely superseded by science, but that should not blind us to the (arguably) reliable efficacy of invocation, nor to the metaphysical implication of this efficacy–that it points to the psychophysical nature of reality.3 This thesis is an inquiry into the use of imagination as being restorative of identity. Working experimentally with poetic-aesthetic method—writings initially, then visual images—I use altered states of mind, and access to the otherworldly, in order to offer re-arrangements of local realities. Preoccupied as most people are with everyday realities, radical proposals—animism, enchantment, non-ordinary ways of knowing and being— don’t often find room: in our everyday lives, workplaces, relationships; or in action-inquiry. The body of this inquiry reflects the qualities of what Bachelard terms an immense philosophical daydream.4 My claim in-depth is, firstly that working with poetic-aesthetic method in this way is restorative: of individual, groups, societies; secondly, that the framings offered in Part V Light are the bases for further in depth research. Initially proposed as inquiry into the healing of disrupted identity (a consequence of organisational and procedural abuse), the focus of inquiry shifts, unfolds. Inquiry into writing, poetry, aesthetics gives way to a deeper inquiry into connectedness; uncovering healing engendered by Seeing connections: to the morethan- human world (animism), the otherworldly (enchantment). Questions of knowing and being surface, along with how to relate these back to the world. In A Language Older Than Words, Jensen relates a story of connecting a plant—a dracaena cane—to a polygraph. The story relates the plant’s responses to a researcher imagining harming it; plant becoming attuned to human; yoghurt responding to death of remote microbes. This leads to altered ways of knowing and being not often in our consciousness; preoccupied as we are with everyday realities.5 Atelier—a series of experimental practices—provokes deeper inquiry: into the nature and frameworks of inquiry, and, ultimately, theory. The problem, the contradiction the scientists are stuck with, is that of mind. Mind has no matter or energy but they can’t escape its predominance over everything they do. Logic exists in the mind. Numbers exist only in the mind. I don’t get upset when they say that ghosts exist in the mind. It’s that only that gets me. Science is only in your mind too, its just that that doesn’t make it bad. Or ghosts either.6 Experience of trauma, abuse, offers distortions of mind and self. These distortions are ascribed as illness but provoked through the deepening inquiry of a series of experimental practices: referred to in this work as The Atelier. I come to suggest that this is a problem of mind; and of our relationship to the unscientific. Playing with these distortions unfolds access to rarely accessed realms: of consciousness; of seeing. Inquiring into these fields of identity reveals new putative fields: Imago-Unfolding; Via Arbora; 4th-Person Inquiry; Action- Phenomenology. These fields occur—in layers—throughout this text, and in mind