Research by Professor Rikke Bjerg Jensen is helping to redefine how the needs of people in higher-risk contexts are considered when designing security technology.

Most of us might assume our digital tools are secure – whether that’s messaging friends, browsing social media, or doing online shopping and banking. But for people living in higher-risk situations, that assumption could expose them to even more risk. For activists, migrants, or any group that finds itself on the margins of a society, the security of a piece of technology matters in a different way. However, there is a mismatch between what designers of security technology design for and what people in higher-risk settings require.

Research by Professor Rikke Bjerg Jensen is helping to redefine how the needs of people in higher-risk contexts are considered when designing security technology.  “Often, we design security for people that look like us or to protect big business,” she says, “But who gets to decide whose security is protected? I’m interested in finding ways for people to talk about the security they need and to have their voices heard.”

The ethnographic approach 

Rikke’s work is rooted in ethnography – which involves spending time with people, observing their daily lives and listening to their experiences. She embeds herself within communities for weeks or months, living alongside them to find out how they think about, talk about and experience security, and how security technology can help or hinder them. She aims to acquire a grounded understanding of the group’s social dynamics and interactions, how they use technology and how they might rely on it for protection.  

Rikke has worked with a wide range of communities around the world including protesters, activists, refugees, migrants and groups set apart because of how they are living. The work focuses on settings where the security of the group is at stake and their lived situation heightens their security risk. For example, an activist group who might want to avoid location-tracking, or someone in a country where costly data might mean a vital message cannot be shared securely.

Her recent collaborative cross-discipline research has included looking at how information security affects those living in conflict zones, people involved in the UK climate movement, and those in post-conflict Lebanon. For one project Rikke spent time on container ships, discovering the experiences of seafarers living and working in isolated settings, cut off from reliable communication for weeks at a time.

What is cryptography and why does Rikke’s approach matter?

In basic terms, cryptography looks at ways of protecting information. While there’s more to cryptography than encryption, this is often how most of us encounter cryptography – and often on a daily basis. For example, secure messaging applications such as WhatsApp and Signal rely on cryptography in the form of end-to-end encryption (E2EE) to ensure that the communications between two or more parties are private and not accessible or tampered with by others.

Knowing what information to protect and from whom, and under which conditions, requires understanding how social interactions work; especially in adversarial contexts where information might put you at risk if obtained by the ‘wrong parties.’ “We were approaching security in the wrong way,” Rikke says. “If we want to design security suitable for all, we need to understand the fundamentals of what security is and how it’s used in different social contexts. We want to understand what security means from the ‘ground up’, considering it not just as a technical feature but in terms of its social context.”

The Social Foundations of Cryptography project

Together with colleagues in cryptography, Rikke researched the 2019-2020 Hong Kong protests, where they, for example, uncovered how the security of the group was compromised when a group member was arrested and police gained access to information about them and the rest of the group. A key goal for protesters was therefore to protect other group members during an arrest, in the moment of compromise – and not after compromise which is what cryptography designs for. It demonstrated a different approach was needed to consider what security means to the people using it in these types of situations. This finding led to Rikke co-founding the Social Foundations of Cryptography project.    

Since then, the team has worked with activists and protesters in several countries outside the UK. Rikke has, for example, conducted extensive fieldwork in a social movement in Kenya. Using their research across ethnography and cryptography they aim to challenge the existing notions of security in cryptography – while establishing new definitions based on their research. The project is funded by the EPSRC and brings together a team of ethnographers and cryptographers, including PhD, post-doctoral and established researchers. The goals are simple: to ground cryptography in socially informed research.

You can find out more of Rikke’s and her colleagues’ research here:

On the Virtues of Information Security in the UK Climate Movement 

Security Patchworking in Lebanon: Infrastructuring Across Failing Infrastructures 

The Everyday Security of Living with Conflict 

Navigating Everyday Connectivities at Sea 

Collective Information Security in Large-Scale Urban Protests: the Case of Hong Kong