One of the main challenges within the field of cybersecurity is how to work with others without having to share or reveal sensitive information. We asked experts from the Hariri Institute’s Center for Reliable Information Systems and Cybersecurity (RISCS) about the role cryptography plays in preserving data privacy while maintaining accountability. Mayank Varia, Ran Canetti, […]
By Ari Karchmer — Alice, a secret hypothesis, and a hostile lab: a fictional story (allegedly) Alice is a graduate student. She studies molecular biology, and her goal is to develop a model for the relationship between a molecule’s structure – i.e., its size, shape, or other attributes – and its activity: whether the molecule […]
by Gavin Brown — Machine learning models serve a variety of purposes in today’s society, such as identifying faces in images or helping customers via a chatbot. Many models are trained on vast amounts of (possibly sensitive) data. The models themselves are large: OpenAI’s celebrated GPT-3 model for generating text has 175 billion parameters. Broadly […]
by Mayank Varia, original featured on The Conversation — The proliferation of child sexual abuse material on the internet is harrowing and sobering. Technology companies send tens of millions of reports per year of these images to the nonprofit National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. The way companies that provide cloud storage for your […]
by Ran Canetti and Gabriel Kaptchuk — Last week, Apple announced that it would deploy two systems to US iPhones with the release of iOS 15. The announcement promotes these systems as standard bearers for preventing child exploitation while preserving the privacy and liberty of its law-abiding users. The two systems are very different. The […]
by Aloni Cohen Be sure to check out part 1 of this blog post here. Data Quality Confidentiality is critical for a useful, high quality Census. Perfect confidentiality is easy to achieve if we don’t care about doing anything with the Census responses. Just erase them. Or don’t collect them at all. But Census […]
By Aloni Cohen A political fight is brewing around the 2020 Census. No, not about the citizenship question. This fight is about confidentiality—what’s the best way to publish useful statistics without disclosing individual census responses? At the center of this fight is a lawsuit between the state of Alabama and the Department of Commerce […]
By Gabe Kaptchuk. It is common to use encryption hundreds of times each day: when unlocking a phone, connecting to the wifi, or loading a webpage. The rise of personal computing and the internet has transformed encryption from an esoteric military tool to critical infrastructure that gives you control over your data. Modern encryption […]
By Ran Canetti and Gabe Kaptchuk. Originally featured on BUToday’s What If Series. In the 2020 election, approximately 46 percent of the national population cast their ballot by mail, up from 24 percent in 2016. Do we want voting from home to stick around? Before attempting an answer, let’s recall what we would like voting […]
By Sarah Scheffler. The best thing about interdisciplinary work is getting to unite concepts from very different areas of study that both fields have studied extensively. As far as I know, law doesn’t have a single formal working definition of “knowledge,” but it does draw heavily from philosophy, which has a whole subfield devoted […]