Cryptology and Social Life Workshop 2025

Cryptology and Social Life Workshop 2025

This workshop took place at NTNU in Trondheim on December 11 and 12, 2025. We had 40 participants from 6 different countries and 10 different institutions.

Organisers

This workshop is organised as part of the Cryptology and Social Life project at NTNU: Tjerand Silde, Katrien De Moor, Emil André Røyrvik, Petter Grytten Almklov.

Program

Thursday December 11:

The workshop dinner includes a visit to the art museum and a three-course meal at Gubalari.

Friday December 12:

Keynotes

Speaker: Phil Rogaway

Title: Can Ethics Be Taught?

Abstract:

Beyond my technical work in cryptography, for 20 years I taught a class on ethics and technology. My students, who would soon graduate in one of our two Computer Science majors, had lived and breathed the Silicon Valley story, which centers technical skill and techno-optimism, individuality, disruption, and wealth. I wanted to turn them into skeptical, ethically focused, socially responsible people. So pretty much their polar opposites. Trying to do this year after year was challenging, depressing, and intensely personal. A fool’s errand?  What, if anything, was it all for?

Bio:

Phil is, or maybe was, a well-known cryptographer. After graduating from MIT he spent much of his career at the University of California, Davis. He developed, along with Mihir Bellare, the approach that brings definitions and proofs to real-world cryptography. His schemes are in numerous cryptographic standards. For decades, however, Phil would fret over the social, political, and environmental threats that modern technologies bring forth. Sometimes he would write or speak about that, too.

Speaker: Rikke Bjerg Jensen

Title: Social Foundations of Cryptography: An Ethnography Talk

Abstract:

Drawing on insights from six-and-a-half-month ethnographic fieldwork with protesters in Kenya in 2024-2025, I will discuss what security means and how it is practised in this setting. In doing so, I will bring ethnography into conversation with cryptography to show how we can use what we learn from ethnographic work to ground cryptographic security notions in 'the field', thus introducing ethnography as a technique in cryptography. For ethnography this means establishing a focus on cryptography before entering the field. For cryptography it means putting itself at the mercy of ethnography. The talk will draw on joint work with several collaborators as part of the Social Foundations of Cryptography project. 

Bio:

I am an ethnographer. I am also a professor in the Information Security Group at Royal Holloway, University of London. Through ethnographic work I explore information security needs, perspectives and practices among groups in specific adversarial contexts. My work focuses on how technology, as it is shaped by social structures, relations and interactions, facilitates multiple and distinctly collective security experiences and understandings. Most recently, I have worked within protest, seafaring, refugee, migrant and post-conflict settings. Homepage: https://rikkebjerg.gitlab.io/me.

Speaker: Jean-François Blanchette

Title: Legislating digital signatures: Lessons from a past cryptographic utopia

Abstract:

Back in 1999, European regulators and businesses were convinced that cryptographic signatures would fuel a booming market in secure online transactions. They even rewrote centuries-old evidence laws to make it happen. 25 years later, that market never really took off. Most of us sign documents by clicking a box, typing our names, or pasting an image, hardly the cryptographic future that was promised.

Burdens of Proof (MIT Press, 2012) looks at those early efforts to turn cryptographic signatures into legal and commercial reality. The book follows how mathematicians, legal scholars, and policymakers tried to align very different worlds — proofs, protocols, and centuries-old civil codes — to define what counts as an electronically signed document. Along the way, it shows cryptography not only as a technical solution, but as a field of design that experimented with forms of security, authority, and trust whose meaning was never self-evident.

This talk gives an overview of that story, what it tells us about the social life of cryptography, and how mathematics gets (or doesn’t get)  translated into law, technical systems, and social norms of trust. The short version is that, unlike mathematics, it’s messy. 

Bio:

Jean-François Blanchette is Research Professor Emeritus in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA and director of the Responsible Data Governance program at the Enssib (École nationale supérieure des sciences de l’information et des bibliothèques) in Lyon, France. He is the author of Burdens of Proof: Cryptographic Culture and Evidence Law in the Age of Electronic Documents (MIT Press, 2012).