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Mikaela Brough

@mikaelabrough.bsky.social

Lecturer in Information Security at Royal Holloway, University of London. Using ethnography to understand (information) security and environmental social movements in PH & UK. mikaelabrough.github.io

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Mikaela Brough @mikaelabrough.bsky.social · last yr.

New ethnographic work with @rikkebjerg.bsky.social and @malb.bsky.social on information security in the UK climate movement -- accepted and presented recently at USENIX Security ’25 in Seattle 🌱 www.usenix.org/conference/u...

On the Virtues of Information Security in the UK Climate Movement | USENIX

usenix.org

Information Security Group | Royal Holloway, UoL @isg-rhul.bsky.social · last yr.

📰 Check out this new report funded by the UK Department for Science, Innovation and Technology on 'Securing Converged Technologies: Insights from Subject Matter Experts' Written by our own Dr @andrewdwyer.bsky.social and @mikaelabrough.bsky.social (CDT in Cyber Security) www.gov.uk/government/p...

Securing converged technologies: insights from subject matter experts

gov.uk

Martin R. Albrecht @malb.bsky.social · last yr.

11 Sep UK Crypto Day in Manchester: uk-crypto-day.github.io/2025/09/11/u... Together with @rikkebjerg.bsky.social I'll be talking about our upcoming work with @bedow.bsky.social and Simone Colombo: At-Compromise Security: The Case for Alert Blindness

Screenshot of https://uk-crypto-day.github.io/2025/09/11/uk-crypto-day/ with text:

Rikke Bjerg Jensen & Martin Albrecht: At-Compromise Security: The Case for Alert Blindness

We start from the observation (Blanchette’12) that cryptography broadly intuits security goals – as modelled in games or ideal functionalities – while claiming realism. This stands in contrast to cryptography’s attentive approach towards examining assumptions and constructions through cryptanalysis and reductions. To close this gap, we introduce a technique for determining security goals. Given that games and ideal functionalities model specific social relations between various honest and adversarial parties, our approach is grounded in a careful social science methodology for studying social relations in their contexts: ethnography. As a first application of this technique, we study security at-compromise (neither pre- nor post-) and introduce the security goal of alert blindness. Specifically, as observed in our 2024/2025 ethnographic fieldwork with protesters in Kenya, alert blindness captures a security goal of abducted persons who were taken by Kenyan security forces for their presumed activism. It may have applications elsewhere.

Joint work with Simone Colombo and Benjamin Dowling.

See also: Social Foundations of Cryptography

Bios. Rikke Bjerg Jensen is a Professor in the Information Security Group at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her work is ethnographic and grounded in explorations of information security practices and needs among groups of people living and working at the margins of societies.

Martin Albrecht is a Professor of Cryptography at King’s College London. He works broadly across the field of cryptography but focuses on the analysis of deployed or soon-to-be deployed cryptographic solutions and on analysing the security of lattice-based cryptography against classical and quantum computers.

Martin R. Albrecht @malb.bsky.social · last yr.

New blog post on our (with @rikkebjerg.bsky.social and @mikaelabrough.bsky.social) USENIX'25 paper "On the Virtues of Information Security in the UK Climate Movement" where I end up reflecting on writing this, for me, unusual work. martinralbrecht.wordpress.com/2025/06/14/o...

On the Virtues of Information Security in the UK Climate Movement

Our paper – titled “On the Virtues of Information Security in the UK Climate Movement” – was accepted at USENIX Security’25. Here’s the abstract: We report on an ethnographic study with members of …

martinralbrecht.wordpress.com