Guest Lecture: Alan Turing Institute representatives

Trustworthy Digital Identity

Making use of the mobile technologies already in use in developing countries

About the talk: Foundational identity platforms are typically motivated by total population inclusion and therefore make no assumptions about personal document or technology ownership. Whilst highly effective in deduplicating each individual with a unique identification number during registration, the biometric method(s) of unique identification are troublesome when afterward used for mundane authentication to centralized identity platforms. In this talk, we explore some of the existing mobile technologies in developing regions and how they can be used to provide a more secure, private, resilient, and reliable authentication experience. In particular, we explore displaying Quick Response (QR) barcodes using legacy and low-cost mobile devices. Our newly developed techniques can benefit not only foundational identity platforms, which is our focus but also mobile and digital currencies.

Speakers:

• Chris Hicks is a postdoctoral research associate at the Alan Turing Institute where his research spans digital identity, security, privacy, and reinforcement learning for cyber. Within the trustworthy digital infrastructure for identity systems project at the Turing Chris focuses on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) and how they can be applied to enhance the privacy and security of national digital identity systems.

• Carsten Maple is a professor of cyber systems engineering and principal investigator of the NCSC-EPSRC Academic Centre of Excellence in Cyber Security Research at the University of Warwick. He is also a co-investigator of the PETRAS National Centre of Excellence for IoT Systems Cybersecurity, and a fellow of the Alan Turing Institute. Carsten published over 250 peer-reviewed papers, is co-author of the UK Security Breach Investigations Report 2010, supported by the Serious Organised Crime Agency and the Police Central e-crime Unit, and co-author of Cyberstalking in the UK, 2012, a report supported by the Crown Prosecution Service and Network for Surviving Stalking. He has given evidence to government committees on issues of anonymity and child safety online. Additionally, he has advised executive and non-executive directors of public sector organizations and multibillion pound private organizations. His research has attracted millions of pounds in funding and has been widely reported through the media. Professor Maple is Immediate Past Chair of the Council of Professors and Heads of Computing in the UK, a member of the Zenzic Strategic Advisory Board, a member of the IoTSF Executive Steering Board, an executive committee member of the EPSRC RAS Network, and a member of the UK Computing Research Committee, the ENISA CarSEC expert group, the Interpol Car Cybercrime Expert group, and Europol European Cybercrime Centre.

• Vasilios Mavroudis is a research associate at the Alan Turing Institute and his interests lie at the intersection of privacy and systems security, with an emphasis on private computations, privacy-preserving statistics, and trusted execution environments. His research has been published in various top-tier conferences including the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETs), and the Network & Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS).

• Jon Crowcroft has been the Marconi Professor of Communications Systems in the Computer Laboratory since October 2001. He has worked in the area of Internet support for multimedia communications for over 30 years. Three main topics of interest have been scalable multicast routing, practical approaches to traffic management, and the design of deployable end-to-end protocols. Current active research areas are opportunistic communications, social networks, and techniques and algorithms to scale infrastructure-free systems. He leans towards a “build and learn” paradigm for research. He graduated in physics from Trinity College, the University of Cambridge (UCL) n 1979, gained an MSc in computing in 1981 and Ph.D. in 1993, both from UCL. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, a Fellow of the ACM, a Fellow of the British Computer Society, a Fellow of the IET and the Royal Academy of Engineering, and a Fellow of the IEEE. He likes teaching and has published a few books based on learning materials.

Host: Assane Gueye