2019/12/14 by Sarah Cline, Cline, Sarah, Jacob E. Aronoff +2
Computer Science · Social Sciences · #Advanced Malware Detection Techniques #Crime Patterns and Interventions #Crime, Illicit Activities, and Governance #Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) #Cybercrime and Law Enforcement Studies #Digital and Cyber Forensics #FOS: Computer and information sciences
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2001.00226
openalex publication_date 2019/12/14 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
As people across the world become increasingly aware of how their privacy is\ncompromised in this digital era, the field of Privacy Enhancing Technologies,\nor PETs, has boomed. The first workshop on Privacy Enhancing Technology was in\n2000, then called the "Workshop on Design Issues in Anonymity and\nUnobservability." By 2007, the workshop had ballooned into a full symposium. In\n2015, the first issue of the Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies\njournal was published. This year in 2019, there were 4 volumes of Proceedings\non Privacy Enhancing Technologies published, containing a total of 66 papers.\nOf these papers, we identified 14 which specifically describe PETs that have\nbeen newly developed or utilized in a new way. We focused on 3 papers that\nseemed to have widespread use cases. Some of these use cases, however, include\ncriminal activity. While heavily focused on adversarial actions and capability,\nmuch of security research does not focus on or consider the social science and\nmotivations behind bad actors. We believe that this is a critical factor to\nconsider when working on the problem of cybercrime. In this paper, we will\nanalyze some of the cutting edge PETs and the potential risks associated with\nthem from the lenses of computer science and criminal justice. We argue that\nthe continued development of privacy enhancing technology contributes to the\nglobal rise of cybercrime.\n