{"id":5243,"date":"2022-08-10T07:39:52","date_gmt":"2022-08-10T11:39:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cds-faculty\/?p=5243"},"modified":"2023-05-30T15:47:12","modified_gmt":"2023-05-30T19:47:12","slug":"varia-on-whatsapp","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cds-faculty\/2022\/08\/10\/varia-on-whatsapp\/","title":{"rendered":"Mayank Varia on security and privacy of end-to-end messaging"},"content":{"rendered":"

Can WhatsApp Messages Be Secure and Encrypted\u2014but Traceable at the Same Time?<\/h4>\n

Professor Mayank Varia’s work looks to balance privacy and human rights with online trust and safety.\"\"<\/p>\n

BU’s The Brink recently featured this impactful research in an article.<\/a><\/p>\n

Cryptographers love an enigma, a problem to solve\u2014and this one has it all. Indestructible codes, secret notes, encryption and decryption.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the puzzle: Someone wants to send a secure message online. It has to be so private, so secret, that they can deny they ever sent it. If someone leaks the message, it can never be traced back to the sender. It\u2019s all very\u00a0Mission: Impossible. But there\u2019s a kicker: if that message peddles abuse or misinformation, maybe threatens violence, then anonymity may need to go out the window\u2014the sender needs to be held to account.<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s the challenge: is there a way to allow people to send confidential, secure, untraceable messages, but still track any menacing ones?<\/p>\n

Mayank Varia might have cracked the conundrum. A cryptographer and computer scientist, Varia is an expert on the societal impact of algorithms and programs, developing systems that balance privacy and security with transparency and social justice. Working with a team of Boston University computer scientists, he\u2019s designed a program called Hecate\u2014fittingly named after the ancient Greek goddess of magic and spells\u2014that can be bolted onto a secure messaging app to beef up its confidentiality, while also allowing moderators to crack down on abuse. The team is presenting\u00a0its findings<\/a>\u00a0at the\u00a031st USENIX Security Symposium<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Read the full article here.<\/a> The article is authored by Andrew Thurston<\/a> with photos by Jackie Ricciardi<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Read about the CDS professor researching the balance of privacy and human rights with online trust and safety.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1690,"featured_media":5244,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[248,35,247,246],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cds-faculty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5243"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cds-faculty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cds-faculty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cds-faculty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1690"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cds-faculty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5243"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cds-faculty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5243\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8524,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cds-faculty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5243\/revisions\/8524"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cds-faculty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5244"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cds-faculty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5243"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cds-faculty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5243"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cds-faculty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5243"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}