The Cryptology and Social Life project brings together four research communities at NTNU: the Department of Information Security and Communication Technology (IIK), the Department of Mathematical Sciences (IMF), the Department of Computer Science (IDI), and the Department of Sociology and Political Science (ISS). Spanning the Faculty of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering (IE) and the Faculty of Social and Educational Sciences (SU), the team unites expertise in cryptography, information security, human-centric cybersecurity, the digitalization of organizations and public-sector infrastructures, and ethnography. This combination allows us to study digital infrastructures not as purely technical systems but as an interwoven challenge across technology, organization, and society, examining how secure and privacy-preserving cryptographic systems are designed, deployed, governed, and ultimately trusted and used.

We received 200 KNOK in seed funding from the NTNU Community strategic area to launch the project in 2025. In September 2026, we received funding for 4 PhD positions to research various technical and social aspects of digital identity wallets, such as the EUDI. Read more about it here!

We visited the Social Foundations of Cryptography research group in London in February 2025 to learn about their work and share experiences. Later, we contributed to their Autumn School in September 2026, where we gave a talk about our project and research into cryptographic evidence in Norwegian courts.