The Case For Human Primacy In Cryptography (Summary From The Keynote Lecture)

In the history of "adversarial" technologies, cryptology has the unique distinction of offering an exponential advantage to the defence over the offence, as long as it is implemented correctly and, crucially, the defence platform is not otherwise compromised. Sadly, the ubiquitous devices wherein people increasingly confide their life stories and secrets, have dubious allegiances, and appear hardly worthy of any trust.This lecture is concerned with the "clouds" that gather over the integrity of our global computing landscape, from an individual, not institutional, perspective. We argue on the basis of the ongoing disappearance of user-accessible honest computing, that the cryptographic research community should strive for security and privacy models that give absolute primacy to human principals, rather than their electronic surrogates.We advocate a human-centric agenda as the core of a broader research programme to build trustworthy systems on top of untrusted platforms. A promising approach is through (strong) human-powered cryptography.