Just a quick reminder that the final registration deadline for the Rossfest Symposium is 25 February 2025. The event is on 25 March 2025.
https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/events/rossfest/
Monthly Archives: February 2025
A feminist argument against weakening encryption
Attacks on encryption continue. The UK government has just reportedly handed Apple a Technical Capability Notice – effectively demanding that Apple allow UK law enforcement access to their users’ encrypted cloud servers. This is the latest in a series of recent pushes by the UK Government and security services to establish backdoors in the end-to-end encrypted services which underpin a great deal of our lives. It is also happening at a time when many of us are really quite scared of the things that governments – particularly the new US administration -might do with backdoor access to Internet platforms. Undermining the security of these services would also hand further power to the companies who provide these platforms to access this data themselves.
This directly threatens the privacy of Apple’s users – and the safety of many of those who might now be targeted for retribution or enforcement. GCHQ has generally argued that there are useful technical work-arounds that can provide access to legitimate authorities to help with law enforcement. The UK government has particularly used the genuine issue of mass-scale online gender-based violence, particularly the exploitation of children, to make the case for mass-scale surveillance of the Internet in order to detect this violence and arrest those culpable.
The government argument here is that encryption and anonymity provide a safe haven for online abusers – they stop investigations, frustrate prosecutions, and form a major blocker to tackling misogynistic violence. I disagree. I’m going to leave the well-rehearsed technical arguments about whether it is feasible to weaken encryption for the government but not for hostile actors to one side for now (spoiler: it isn’t), and focus on the substantive policy area of gender based violence itself.
Continue reading A feminist argument against weakening encryption
It is time to standardize principles and practices for software memory safety
In an article in the February, 2025 issue of Communications of the ACM, I join 20 coauthors from across academia and industry in writing about the remarkable opportunity for universal strong memory safety in low-level Trusted Computing Bases (TCBs) enabled by recent advances in type- and memory-safe systems programming languages (e.g., the Rust language), hardware memory protection (e.g., our work on CHERI), formal methods, and software compartmentalisation. These technologies are seeing increasing early deployment in critical software TCBs, but struggle to make headway at scale given real costs and potential disruption stemming from their adoption combined with unclear market demand despite widespread recognition of the criticality of this issue. As a result, billions of lines of memory-unsafe C/C++ systems code continue to make up essential TCBs across the industry – including Windows, Linux, Android, iOS, Chromium, OpenJDK, FreeRTOS, vxWorks, and others. We argue that a set of economic factors such as high opportunity costs, negative security impact as an externality, and two-sided incomplete information regarding memory safety lead to limited and slow adoption despite the huge potential security benefit: It is widely believed that these techniques would have deterministically eliminated an estimated 70% of critical security vulnerabilities in these and other C/C++ TCBs over the last decade.
In our article, we describe how developing standards for memory-safe systems may be able to help enable remedies by making potential benefit more clear (and hence facilitating clear signalling of demand) as well as permitting interventions such as:
- Improving actual industrial practice
- Enabling acquisition requirements that incorporate memory-safety expectations
- Enabling subsidies or tax incentives
- Informing international discussions around software liability
- Informing policy interventions for specific, critical classes of products/use cases