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Open Book: A Socially-inspired Cloaking Technique that Uses Lexical Abstraction to Transform Messages

Published: 18 April 2015 Publication History

Abstract

Both governments and corporations routinely surveil computer-mediated communication (CMC). Technologists often suggest widespread encryption as a defense mechanism, but CMC encryption schemes have historically faced significant usability and adoption problems. Here, we introduce a novel technique called Open Book designed to address these two problems. Inspired by how people deal with eavesdroppers offline, Open Book uses data mining and natural language processing to transform CMC messages into ones that are vaguer than the original. Specifically, we present: 1) a greedy Open Book algorithm that cloaks messages by transforming them to resemble the average Internet message; 2) an open-source, browser-based instantiation of it called Read Me, designed for Gmail; and, 3) a set of experiments showing that intended recipients can decode Open Book messages, but that unintended human- and machine-recipients cannot. Finally, we reflect on some open questions raised by this approach, such as recognizability and future side-channel attacks.

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Cited By

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  • (2022)Stop Reinventing the Wheel! Promoting Community Software in Computing EducationProceedings of the 2022 Working Group Reports on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education10.1145/3571785.3574129(261-292)Online publication date: 27-Dec-2022
  • (2018)Lost in the Digital WildProceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Multimedia Privacy and Security10.1145/3267357.3267365(27-37)Online publication date: 15-Oct-2018
  • (2017)ThumprintProceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3025453.3025991(3764-3774)Online publication date: 2-May-2017

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  1. Open Book: A Socially-inspired Cloaking Technique that Uses Lexical Abstraction to Transform Messages

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI '15: Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    April 2015
    4290 pages
    ISBN:9781450331456
    DOI:10.1145/2702123
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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    Publication History

    Published: 18 April 2015

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    Author Tags

    1. cmc
    2. encryption
    3. social media
    4. usable security

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    CHI '15: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    April 18 - 23, 2015
    Seoul, Republic of Korea

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    CHI '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 486 of 2,120 submissions, 23%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 6,199 of 26,314 submissions, 24%

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    View all
    • (2022)Stop Reinventing the Wheel! Promoting Community Software in Computing EducationProceedings of the 2022 Working Group Reports on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education10.1145/3571785.3574129(261-292)Online publication date: 27-Dec-2022
    • (2018)Lost in the Digital WildProceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Multimedia Privacy and Security10.1145/3267357.3267365(27-37)Online publication date: 15-Oct-2018
    • (2017)ThumprintProceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3025453.3025991(3764-3774)Online publication date: 2-May-2017

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