Design Justice in Security Architectures

Feminist theorists have long argued that gendered security problems, such as domestic abuse, are "individualized" and taken out of the public and political domain (Tickner 2004; Walby et al 2014).
Unfortunately, the emerging field of cybersecurity risks recreating these dynamics by omitting or dismissing gendered technologically-facilitated abuse (or "tech abuse") such as stalking, surveillance, and image-based abuse (or "revenge porn") from the threat models that shape where researchers investigate challenges to security (Slupska 2019).

The project is based on the following research questions/objectives:
RQ1: How can cybersecurity practices better serve the targets of tech abuse?
RQ2: How can feminist theory and praxis improve cybersecurity research and practice?

On the basis of these two research questions, I plan to develop a feminist approach to cybersecurity which draws on feminist critiques of security studies (Enloe 1989; Cohn 1987; Tickner 2004), feminist technoscience (Wajcman 2007) and the emerging 'design justice' model for technology design (Constanza-Chock 2018). I will start by conducting a set of empirical studies, which will form the basis of a normative political theory for cybersecurity. These empirical studies may include:

- co-designing an "abusability" test for smart devices or image sharing platforms with survivors, tech abuse experts, and conventional cybersecurity experts
- follow-up interviews with co-design workshop participants to explore contrasting understandings of security and strategies for approaching tech abuse
- interviews with product managers exploring how abusability could become incorporated into industry practice
- participatory action research in the form of feminist digital security trainings

This project will use innovative co-design methodologies which have only rarely been applied to cybersecurity. Following feminist approaches to knowledge creation and the emerging 'design justice' model for technology design (Constanza-Chock 2018), people's individual experiences and individual positionality may help to expand how cybersecurity researchers do the work of threat modelling and usable security design. Rather than dictating what threats citizens should be worrying about, this project will develop a model for eliciting and listening to citizens' concerns to expand the scope of threat modelling in cybersecurity. This process will also create pathways for citizens to engage in shaping future research directions for cybersecurity: ones that are grounded in the lived experience of those who are traditionally excluded from discussions of cyber- or information security.

Inspired by Marwick and Boyd's (2018) call for projects that discuss more diverse conceptualizations of "the user" or the subject, I will use collaborative, participatory, and creative citizen-science practices to address cybersecurity challenges. Participatory security design avoids the assumption that security of the individual will follow from technical security and ensures that actors who may ordinarily be marginalized have their perspectives taken into account (Heath et al. 2018). It incorporates 'situated' knowledge and practices (Haraway 1988) so that information security can be studied in a grounded way. Such methods have proved fruitful for designing nuanced privacy mechanisms for smart homes (Yao et al. 2019) and anticipating security and privacy threats with survivors of intimate partner abuse (Leitão 2019).

This project falls within the EPSRC Information and communication technologies (ICT) research area and Human-Computer Interaction sub-theme.

It is part of the nature of Cyber Security - and a key reason for the urgency in developing new research approaches - that it now is a concern of every section of society, and so the successful CDT will have a very broad impact indeed. We will ensure impact for:

* The IT industry; vendors of hardware and software, and within this the IT Security industry;

* High value/high assurance sectors such as banking, bio-medical domains, and critical infrastructure, and more generally the CISO community across many industries;

* The mobile systems community, mobile service providers, handset and platform manufacturers, those developing the technologies of the internet of things, and smart cities;

* Defence sector, MoD/DSTL in particular, defence contractors, and the intelligence community;

* The public sector more generally, in its own activities and in increasingly important electronic engagement with the citizen;

* The not-for-profit sector, education, charities, and NGOs - many of whom work in highly contended contexts, but do not always have access to high-grade cyber defensive skills.

Impact in each of these will be achieved in fresh elaborations of threat and risk models; by developing new fundamental design approaches; through new methods of evaluation, incorporating usability criteria, privacy, and other societal concerns; and by developing prototype and proof-of-concept solutions exhibiting these characteristics. These impacts will retain focus through the way that the educational and research programme is structured - so that the academic and theoretical components are directed towards practical and anticipated problems motivated by the sectors listed here.