International Association
for Cryptologic Research

The candidate will work alongside Prof. Martin Albrecht, Dr. Benjamin Dowling, Dr. Rikke Bjerg Jensen (Royal Holloway University of London) and Dr. Andrea Medrado (Exeter) on establishing social foundations of cryptography in protest settings. In particular, the candidate will work with a multi-disciplinary team of cryptographers (Dowling, Albrecht) and ethnographers (Jensen, Medrado) to understand the security needs of participants in protests, to formalise these needs as cryptographic security notions and to design or analyse cryptographic solutions with respect to these notions.

This position is part of the EPSRC-funded project “Social Foundations of Cryptography” and more information is available at https://social-foundations-of-cryptography.gitlab.io/.

In brief, ethnography is a social science method involving prolonged fieldwork, i.e. staying with the group under study, to observe not only what they say but also what their social reality and practice is. In this project, we are putting cryptography at the mercy of ethnographic findings, allowing them to shape what we model.