Cybersecurity Project

Saying that cybersecurity is a "difficult problem" is like saying that reversing global warming is a difficult problem: it's true, but it doesn't quite capture just how really hard the problem is. There's no single reason why creating a more secure global network is so difficult; it in part has to do with the radically-distributed architecture of the Net, in part with some deep flaws computer software, and in part just from its sheer size and importance to our daily lives. (For more on this, see the nice Cybersecurity backgrounder.)

So we came in not with the goal of providing a magical elixir that would make all credit card transactions magically secure and make it impossible for hackers to compromise Gmail's security. Instead, we wanted to offer suggestions with minimal implementation headaches and maximal benefit to users, from novices to experts. This page has a short video overview of the ideas, explains some of the details of our proposal, and even has an alpha-release Firefox plugin that you can download and try out (thanks to Elance for this, by the way).