New encryption method emulates the way parents talk to their children

New encryption method emulates the way parents talk to their children

Published 6 July 2015

 

Encrypting e-mails can be tedious, difficult, and very confusing. Even for those who have mastered the process, it is useless unless the intended recipient has the correct software to decode the message. A researcher has now created an easier method — one that sounds familiar to parents who try to outsmart their 8-year-old child. The new technique gets rid of the complicated, mathematically generated messages that are typical of encryption software. Instead, the method transforms specific e-mails into ones that are vague by leaving out key words.

Encrypting e-mails can be tedious, difficult, and very confusing. Even for those who have mastered the process, it is useless unless the intended recipient has the correct software to decode the message. A Georgia Institute of Technology researcher has created an easier method — one that sounds familiar to parents who try to outsmart their 8-year-old child. The new technique gets rid of the complicated, mathematically generated messages that are typical of encryption software. Instead, the method transforms specific e-mails into ones that are vague by leaving out key words.
“It’s kind of like when mom and dad are talking about potential vacation spots while the kids are nearby,” said Eric Gilbert, the Georgia Tech assistant professor who developed the software. “They can’t say or spell ‘Disney,’ or the children will get too excited. So they use other words and the meaning is implied. Instead of ‘Disney,’ they could say ‘have you bought tickets to the place yet.’”
A Georgia Tech release reports that Gilbert’s Open Book system, a prototype that uses a Google Mail plug-in called Read Me, works the same way by substituting specific words with ambiguous ones. If the above example was an e-mail conversation, the sender would write, “Have you bought tickets to Disney yet?” Open Book would change the message when it was sent. The other person would see, “Have you bought tickets to (place) yet?”
The process reduces the information disclosed to eavesdroppers or computer systems that monitor online communications, while taking advantage of common ground between the participants.
“As people react more with each other, they don’t have to say as much to understand what is being said,” said Gilbert. “Open Book uses the same technique. Even though the messages resemble typical email conversations, they’re lost in the background noise of the Internet.”
To test the reliability, Gilbert put together a small study of ten people who each wrote e-mails to five friends, which were then transformed by Open Book. The recipients correctly deciphered the missing words or phrases 95 percent of the time. When the same vague emails were shown to strangers, only 2 percent were interpreted correctly.
GT notes that the system, which is not commercially available yet, is tailored for people who know each other. Readers cannot transform the vague e-mail back into specific terms if they are confused and unsure of its meaning.
Gilbert says he has noticed more interest in encryption since Edward Snowden leaked documents about government surveillance. He thinks Open Book could be beneficial for anyone who cares to hide information online, whether it is from the government, a nosy employer, or from search engines that use communications for marketing purposes.
— Read more in Eric Gilbert, Open Book: A Socially Inspired Cloaking Technique that Uses Lexical Abstraction to Transform Messages (the system was presented at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems [CHI 2015] in Seoul, South Korea, 18-23 April)