Good security and cybercrime research often creates an impact and we want to ensure that impact is positive. This week I will discuss three papers on ethics in computer security research in the run up to next week’s Security and Human Behaviour workshop (SHB). Ethical issues in research using datasets of illicit origin (Thomas, Pastrana, Hutchings, Clayton, Beresford) from IMC 2017, Measuring eWhoring (Pastrana, Hutchings, Thomas, Tapiador) from IMC 2019, and An Ethics Framework for Research into Heterogeneous Systems (Happa, Nurse, Goldsmith, Creese, Williams).

Ethical issues in research using datasets of illicit origin (blog post) came about because in prior work we had noticed that there were ethical complexities to take care of when using data that had “fallen off the back of a lorry” such as the backend databases of hacked booter services that we had used. We took a broad look at existing published guidance to synthesise those issues which particularly apply to using data of illicit origin and we expected to see discussed by researchers: