The Oxford Internet Institute's Ethics in Networked Systems Research project is developing practical guidelines for computer scientists and engineers to assess the ethical implications and social impact of your work. A preliminary version of this work was commissioned by Google's Measurement Lab project to review ethical and privacy implications of their mobile network experimentation (pdf).   Through interdisciplinary workshops around the world, we have been working to extend the scope of this ethics tool in order to be applicable to a wide variety of engineering projects. Philosophers, engineers, and lawyers participated in these workshops and reflected on moral justifications and technical solutions in practical cases, which generated some interesting new insights for the guidelines.   The workshop will reflect on some typical moral dilemmas of tech projects, demo practical applications of the guidelines through a few case studies, and discuss the benefits of the iterative moral reflexivity approach for engineering projects. One of the aims of this project is to structure conversations about technology ethics between engineers, users, managers, lawyers, and ethics boards in order to make them more informed and meaningful. Technical researchers and project teams will benefit from applying these guidelines to structure internal project design discussions and to develop a coherent external narrative.    The guidelines are still in draft form and you are invited to contribute critical expert input during the presentation, or via a collaborative document afterwards. This talk is part of a 3-week series where the project’s lead researcher Ben Zevenbergen will present and workshop the ethical guidelines around Europe and the US. Previous input has been gathered at universities and conferences in London, Brussels, Amsterdam, New York, Toronto, Vancouver, Delaware, San Diego, Sydney, Berlin, and Vienna. An up-to-date version of the guidelines will be shared a week before the talk.

In this talk, I will discuss three ways we have applied a human science approach to understanding specific cyber-security related issues. First, I will present our work on ideological communities where a combination of computational linguistics, social role theory, forensic psychology and social network analysis has been used to understand the social composition of online groups, and how people rise to influence, and fall from grace. The second investigated how novel measures of the dynamics of communication can be used to assess power within dyadic conversations, and (to a degree) to remotely assess dark triad type traits. Finally, I will present our initial work on susceptibility to phishing attacks via simulated social engineering attacks, alongside our theoretical work on individual susceptibility to malevolent influence.

DNS underpins the majority of communications made over the internet; web surfing, sending emails, file transfer, etc. all rely on DNS and yet it is largely unknown. Alongside legitimate DNS traffic there are also less desirable uses: Denial of Service attacks, malware communication, spam, etc.. Some of these behaviours leave traces that can be seen and in some cases countered. In this talk we will see what DNS ecosystem looks like, and how the internet looks from one point within it.

Cybersecurity capacity-building has become a major objective of both national strategic planning and technological innovation. National cybersecurity strategies, cybercrime legislation, cybersecurity standards, and awareness raising campaigns all seek to enhance the resilience of the nation against advancing cyber threats. While these policy initiatives all seek to achieve a similar goal, it is difficult to identify the actual impact these initiatives have on the cyber resilience of a country. How does a nation know that its policy efforts are working? At this point, there has been no effort to assess potential relationships between more qualitative cyber capacity instruments, and more quantitative indicators for cyber resilience used by cybersecurity practitioners. This research is profoundly needed as an increasing number of countries seek to build cybersecurity capacity through a variety of means. Assessing relationships between policy and resilience data has the potential to greatly enhance the effectiveness of policy implementation and re-evaluate potentially inflated risk metrics produced by cybersecurity practitioners. Ultimately, effective cybersecurity policy would enable cybersecurity practitioners to enhance national resilience while also facilitating practitioners to impact strategic decision making.

Anonymous digital signatures play an important role in protecting the privacy of signers in real world applications. In this talk I will survey schemes related to an important type of anonymous signatures, namely Attribute-Based Signatures (ABS) and discuss them from both a theoretical and practical point of view.

In spite of optimistic predictions that the Internet would bring liberation and democracy to China, the Communist leadership now seems to be more strongly in control of its cyberspace than ever. Furthermore, it has shifted its position from a passive censor to an active user of the various tools that information technology provides, not merely to influence public discourse, but also increasingly to guide and manage citizens’ behaviour. This talk will situate recent developments in China’s Internet Governance approach in the historical context of Chinese politics, and will discuss exactly how the Chinese state has structured its Internet management apparatus. It will also discuss implications for academic views on the roles of different stakeholders in Internet governance.

The running of the core functions behind the Internet is coordinated – a better word than ‘governed’ – by a distributed collaborative of processes, mechanisms, and organisations, each distinct and interdependent on one another. The global and cross-border nature of the Internet challenges the concept of governance by only governments or groups of government. Partly, this is why these various governance processes have evolved organically to be both global and ‘multi-stakeholder’ in nature, resulting in a pioneering democratic effort to tackle these challenges in a novel approach. The evolution of this model has reached a significant crossroads with the announcement in March 2014 of its intention to transition its historic role of oversight over the core, narrow set of technical functions called ‘IANA’, which ICANN administers, to ‘the global multi-stakeholder community’. The IANA functions include the allocation and maintenance of the unique codes and numbering systems of the Internet (such as Internet Protocol addresses). At the end of the process, all those concerned with the Internet, from the technical community and governments to civil society, will have the equal responsibility for overseeing these key functions. The U.S. announcement in March 2014 set into motion two open, public processes. One is for the global Internet community to develop a proposal for this stewardship transition. The second effort is to enhance ICANN’s governance and accountability mechanisms in light of the US Government’s transition away from its stewardship role. This is an important moment in the history of the Internet and ICANN; a testament to how the organisation, the Internet’s community and the ‘multi-stakeholder’ model of governance have matured. We now have a multi-stakeholder model of governance and operational mechanisms that are ready to function on their own, led by a community of stakeholders rather than a central, top-down governmental authority, having demonstrated the efficient management and coordination of the Domain Name System by ICANN and the Internet technical community over the past 16 years. As the Internet community’s preparations for this transition near their end, Theresa Swinehart, who leads ICANN’s global facilitation of the transition, will share her perspective on this crucial moment in the evolution of the Internet and its Governance, and what it means for the future running of this ‘global commons’.

The elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem (ECDLP) is one of the core number theory problems used in cryptography today. In particular, TLS now supports elliptic curve cryptography protocols for both key exchange and authentication. The elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem is believed to be much harder than the discrete logarithm problem over finite fields and the factorization problem, as the best attacks for commonly used parameters are still generic DLP algorithms. As key sizes in applications are chosen accordingly, it is important to understand the exact hardness of ECDLP.   In this talk, we will review existing algorithms to solve ECDLP, with a special focus on index calculus attacks. These attacks have been very successful against other discrete logarithm problems, in particular over finite fields. For elliptic curves, they have also led to L(2/3) algorithms for some particular families (which are however never used in practice). We will describe recent work giving potential generalizations of these attacks to families recommended in standards, including binary curves and prime curves, and we will highlight remaining challenges in their complexity analysis.

PRISONER is a tool designed to help researchers interact more ethically with social media data: it is concerned with Ethics (communicate clearly to participants how your experiment handles their data, and minimise and sanitise their data so you only see what you need), Reproducibility (archive and share your experimental workflows and data), and Extensibility (the softaware is free and open-source, building a community of developers). See http://prisoner.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/ for more information.   Social network sites (SNSs) such as Facebook and Twitter attract hundreds of millions of users each month. Studying these services provides lots of insights into how communities and society communicate and behave, opening a wide range of research directions. The study of SNSs, however, raises a number of ethical questions: are their data fair game for researchers? Should people whose data have been used be considered participants? What are the potential privacy risks of using these data?In this talk, I will discuss some examples of controversial SNS experiments, and introduce some recent work we have undertaken to improve the ethical conduct of such studies, particularly concerning the acquisition of consent in large-scale studies, and a tool we are developing (PRISONER) to help manage the ethical requirements of SNS experiments and to protect the privacy of participants.

Co-hosted by the Cyber Studies Programme, University of Oxford Department of Politics and Internatoinal Relations. Abstract: In many societies, civil disobedience is an established form of political protest. From the late 1980s onwards, the twin rise of global protest movements and home computers led activists to explore how to reinvent civil disobedience for the online world. A variety of disobedient digital practices have emerged since this period, some of which seem set to stay for the future. From the perspective of political philosophy, we are also confronted with new types of action that challenge the traditional understanding of civil disobedience. This session will explore the realm of digital disobedience and discuss whether and how these actions can or cannot be understood as civil disobedience today.