Eric Gilbert
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.
- 1. L. Backstrom and J. Kleinberg. Romantic partnerships and the dispersion of social ties: A network analysis of relationship status on Facebook. In Proc. CSCW, pages 831--841, 2014. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- 2. C. Baker, C. Fillmore, and J. B. Lowe. The Berkeley FrameNet Project. In Proc. COLING, pages 86--90, 1998. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 3. P. Biernacki and D. Waldorf. Snowball Sampling: Problems and Techniques of Chain Referral Sampling. Sociological Methods & Research, 10(2):141--163, 1981.Google ScholarCross Ref
- 4. D. M. Blei, A. Y. Ng, and M. I. Jordan. Latent dirichlet allocation. JMLR, 3:993--1022, 2003. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 5. M. S. Blumenthal and D. D. Clark. Rethinking the design of the Internet: the end-to-end arguments vs. the brave new world. ACM TOIT, 1(1):70--109, 2001. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 6. D. Boneh et al. Twenty years of attacks on the RSA cryptosystem. Notices of the AMS, 46(2):203--213, 1999.Google Scholar
- 7. boyd, danah and Marwick, Alice. Social Privacy in Networked Publics: Teens' Attitudes, Practices, and Strategies. In A Decade in Internet Time: Symposium on the Dynamics of the Internet and Society, 1999.Google Scholar
- 8. T. Brants and A. Franz. Web 1T 5-gram Version 1. Linguistic Data Consortium, Philadelphia, 2006.Google Scholar
- 9. S. E. Brennan. The grounding problem in conversations with and through computers. Social and cognitive approaches to interpersonal communication, pages 201--225, 1998.Google Scholar
- 10. R. S. Campbell and J. W. Pennebaker. The secret life of pronouns flexibility in writing style and physical health. Psychological Science, 14(1):60--65, 2003.Google ScholarCross Ref
- 11. J. Chen, G. Hsieh, J. U. Mahmud, and J. Nichols. Understanding individuals' personal values from social media word use. In Proc. CSCW, pages 405--414, 2014. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 12. C. Chung and J. W. Pennebaker. The psychological functions of function words. Social communication, pages 343--359, 2007.Google Scholar
- 13. H. H. Clark. Using language, volume 1996. Cambridge University Press Cambridge, 1996.Google ScholarCross Ref
- 14. H. H. Clark and S. E. Brennan. Grounding in communication. Perspectives on socially shared cognition, 13(1991):127--149, 1991.Google Scholar
- 15. H. H. Clark and M. A. Krych. Speaking while monitoring addressees for understanding. Journal of Memory and Language, 50(1):62--81, 2004.Google ScholarCross Ref
- 16. W. Diffie and M. E. Hellman. New directions in cryptography. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 22(6):644--654, 1976. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 17. D. Gergle, R. E. Kraut, and S. R. Fussell. The impact of delayed visual feedback on collaborative performance. In Proc. CHI, pages 1303--1312. ACM, 2006. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 18. G. Greenwald and E. MacAskill. NSA Prism program taps in to user data of Apple, Google and others. The Guardian, June 6, 2013.Google Scholar
- 19. J. T. Hancock and P. J. Dunham. Language use in computer-mediated communication: The role of coordination devices. Discourse Processes, 31(1):91--110, 2001.Google ScholarCross Ref
- 20. S. G. Hart and L. E. Staveland. Development of NASA-TLX (task load index): Results of empirical and theoretical research. Human mental workload, 1(3):139--183, 1988.Google Scholar
- 21. P. J. Hinds and D. E. Bailey. Out of sight, out of sync: Understanding conflict in distributed teams. Organization science, 14(6):615--632, 2003. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 22. F. Jin, R. P. Khandpur, N. Self, E. Dougherty, S. Guo, F. Chen, B. A. Prakash, and N. Ramakrishnan. Modeling Mass Protest Adoption in Social Network Communities Using Geometric Brownian Motion. In Proc. KDD, pages 1660--1669, 2014. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 23. B. Klimt and Y. Yang. Introducing the Enron Corpus. In CEAS, 2004.Google Scholar
- 24. G. Miller. WordNet: A Lexical Database for English. CACM, 38(11):39--41, 1995. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 25. C. Z. Mooney and R. D. Duval. Bootstrapping: A nonparametric approach to statistical inference. 1993.Google ScholarCross Ref
- 26. R. L. Rivest, A. Shamir, and L. Adleman. A method for obtaining digital signatures and public-key cryptosystems. CACM, 21(2):120--126, 1978. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 27. N. S. Shami, J. Nichols, and J. Chen. Social Media Participation and Performance at Work: A Longitudinal Study. In Proc. CHI, pages 115--118, 2014. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 28. S. Sheng, L. Broderick, C. A. Koranda, and J. J. Hyland. Why Johnny still can't encrypt: evaluating the usability of email encryption software. In Proc. SOUPS, 2006.Google Scholar
- 29. N. Spasojevic, J. Yan, A. Rao, and P. Bhattacharyya. LASTA: Large Scale Topic Assignment on Multiple Social Networks. In Proc. KDD, pages 1809--1818, 2014. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 30. S. Subramaniam. Frontiers in E-commerce Personalization. In Proc. KDD, pages 1516--1516, 2014. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 31. J. Vertesi. My Experiment Opting Out of Big Data Made Me Look Like a Criminal. Time, May 1, 2014.Google Scholar
- 32. H. M. Wallach. Topic modeling: beyond bag-of-words. In Proc. ICML, pages 977--984, 2006. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 33. A. Whitten and J. D. Tygar. Why Johnny can't encrypt: A usability evaluation of PGP 5.0. In Proceedings of the 8th USENIX Security Symposium, 1999. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 34. S.-H. Yang, A. Kolcz, A. Schlaikjer, and P. Gupta. Large-scale High-precision Topic Modeling on Twitter. In Proc. KDD, pages 1907--1916, 2014. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 35. P. R. Zimmermann. The official PGP user's guide. MIT press, 1995. Google ScholarDigital Library
Index Terms
- Open Book: A Socially-inspired Cloaking Technique that Uses Lexical Abstraction to Transform Messages
Recommendations
Multi-Identity Single-Key Decryption without Random Oracles
Information Security and CryptologyMulti-Identity Single-Key Decryption (MISKD) is an Identity-Based Encryption (IBE) system where a private decryption key can map multiple public keys (identities). More exactly, in MISKD, a single private key can be used to decrypt multiple ciphertexts ...
Chosen-ciphertext secure proxy re-encryption
CCS '07: Proceedings of the 14th ACM conference on Computer and communications securityIn a proxy re-encryption (PRE) scheme, a proxy is given special information that allows it to translate a ciphertext under one key into a ciphertext of the same message under a different key. The proxy cannot, however, learn anything about the messages ...
Benefits and Drawbacks of Using Social Media to Grieve Following the Loss of Pet
#SMSociety17: Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Social Media & SocietyAs social media becomes more deeply embedded into our daily lives, researchers are examining how previously private disclosures and interactions are manifesting in semi-public spaces. This study evaluates how sites like Facebook may help users grieve ...
Comments