Cecylia Bocovich, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science
Chelsea Komlo, HashiCorp
Privacy Enhancing Technology communities rely on the research community for help designing and validating protocols, finding potential attack vectors, and applying new technological innovations to existing protocols. However, while the research community has made significant progress studying projects such as Tor, the number of research outcomes that have actually been incorporated into privacy enhancing technologies such as The Tor Project is lower than the number of feasible and useful research outcomes.
Matthew Finkel, The Tor Project
There are hundreds of millions of new "smart" mobile device users every year, but the mobile ecosystem and infrastructure are designed and built for optimizing convenience, not protecting the privacy of the user. From a design flaw in the Internet Protocol to an abundence of physical sensors, a mobile device may tell a third-party more information than the user intended or wanted.
With the rapid increase of threats on the Internet, people are continuously seeking privacy and anonymity. Services such as Bitcoin and Tor were introduced to provide anonymity for online transactions and Web browsing. Due to its pseudonymity model, Bitcoin lacks retroactive operational security, which means historical pieces of information could be used to identify a certain user.
Digital disinformation presents a mounting threat to, and challenge for, liberal democracies. Global events like Brexit, electoral interference, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, have made the abstract threat of digital disinformation into a distinct reality. The shifting global balance of power, characterized by growing multipolarity, is unfolding alongside the expansion of tools, strategies, and spaces for adversarial states and non-state actors to expand their influence, disrupt multilateral diplomacy, threaten liberal democratic norms and values, and de-legitimize a rules-based global order.
This interdisciplinary workshop will help to bring together awareness among the academic community, industry, civil society, and government, outlining and assessing the evolving threat of digital disinformation while also providing direction and guidance on how to protect liberal democracies like Canada from weaponized digital disinformation.
This event centres on our theme, “Protecting Diverse Application Domains", which will highlight current and future efforts within the cybersecurity and privacy sphere, with keynote speakers, panel discussions, and industry talks. This conference is open to undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, entrepreneurs, start ups, government, sponsors, and businesses.