"Preventing Abuse in Encrypted Communication"

It remains a significant challenge to mitigate the abuse of encrypted social media communication on WhatsApp, Signal, and other platforms while ensuring user privacy. This challenge is present across technological, legal, and social realms. A multidisciplinary team of Cornell researchers received a five-year, $3 million National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to make significant steps toward safe and secure online communication. The project, "Privacy-Preserving Abuse Prevention for Encrypted Communications Platforms," aims to prevent abuse in encrypted communication by going beyond just technical aspects. Using a multidisciplinary approach in this project is expected to help delve deeper into the design of systems, understanding their use by different communities, legal frameworks, and questions regarding social norms and expectations. The team has been working on this challenge for some time as they just released a new paper on arXiv titled "Increasing Adversarial Uncertainty to Scale Private Similarity Testing," which addresses the difficulty of enabling privacy-preserving client-side warnings of potential abuse in encrypted communication. The NSF-funded research is organized based on two overlapping approaches, which are algorithm-driven and community-driven. The algorithm-driven approach focuses on developing better cryptographic tools for privacy-aware abuse detection in encrypted settings. For example, it is important to detect viral, fast-spreading content. A human-centered approach to understanding people's privacy expectations will inform the design of these tools. Legal analyses will also support the tools to ensure that they are in compliance with applicable privacy and content-moderation laws. The community-driven approach will focus on providing tools to online communities that address abuse challenges in encrypted settings. The researchers will explore the development of distributed moderation capabilities to support communities on these platforms. This article continues to discuss the project aimed at mitigating the abuse of encrypted social media communication while also preserving user privacy. 

Homeland Security News Wire reports "Preventing Abuse in Encrypted Communication"