Paper 2026/252

At-Compromise Security: The Case for Alert Blindness

Simone Colombo, King's College London

Benjamin Dowling, King's College London

Rikke Bjerg Jensen, Royal Holloway, University of London

Abstract

We start from the observation in prior work 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 methodology is ethnography: a careful social science methodology for studying social relations in their contexts. As a first application of this technique, i.e. ethnography in cryptography, we study security at-compromise (neither pre- nor post-) and introduce the security goal of alert blindness. Specifically, in our 2024/2025 six-and-a-half-month ethnographic fieldwork with protesters in Kenya, we observed that alert blindness captures a security goal of abducted persons who were taken by Kenyan security forces for their presumed activism. We show this notion is achievable under standard assumptions by providing a construction secure in our model. We discussed both the notion and the construction with some interlocutors in Kenya.

Note: This version updates the code to the version accepted by the EUROCRYPT 2026 artifact evaluation committee.

@misc{cryptoeprint:2026/252,
      author = {Martin R. Albrecht and Simone Colombo and Benjamin Dowling and Rikke Bjerg Jensen},
      title = {At-Compromise Security: The Case for Alert Blindness},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2026/252},
      year = {2026},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2026/252}
}