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 how devilishly complicated and multifaceted the problems really are. 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).
Overview
We discussed this topic at length in an in-class presentation on January 19. This 9-minute video summarizes and extends the presentation we gave that day.
Specific Proposals
Public Service Announcement
We created a Public Service Announcement for generating public awareness for the cybersecurity problem, and showed in class on January 19. It's online here but is password-protected. Please email us if you were in the class and would like the password. In sum, we don't think a direct public awareness campaign will be very effective. We want to nudge users and change their behavior by changing the way browsers and websites work, not by scolding people.
SafeWord
SafeWord is a real, working FireFox plugin designed to nudge users into keeping safer and more unique passwords, though it's too unstable and unrefined to be considered anything buy alpha software. It's available for download here. To install, save that file to your disk, select File --> Open in Firefox 3.5 or above, and install it. You will need to restart Firefox before it takes effect. Thanks to Elance for helping with the coding on very short notice.
We have a video demo of one of the key features of SafeWord here.