Section: New Results

Largest-scale user study of secure messaging and API usage

Participants : Francesca Musiani [CNRS] , Ksenia Ermoshina [CNRS] , Harry Halpin, Iness Ben Guirat [INSAT] .

As part of the NEXTLEAP EC project, we engaged in the largest ever user study of secure messaging applications, focusing on typical users as well as “high-risk” users in the Middle East and Ukraine, as well as developers.[41]. This work has been shared with standardization efforts such as the IETF Message Layer Security (MLS) effort in which Inria is participating, as well as W3C standardization of the W3C Web Authentication API. This work helped influence the formal verification of the privacy properties of hardware-based cryptographic authentication, which is a feature needed by many at risk users whose accounts are often the focus of hacks. This work has also led a fundamental inquiry into the social governance of standards and the role of formal verification in the future of standards.[42] As this work is highly interdisciplinary, it has featured collaboration with sociologists at CNRS and interns from INSAT in Tunisia, as well as a lecture series hosted at Centre Pompidou under the direction of Bernard Stiegler and Harry Halpin.