September 12, 2022

Cornell Tech researchers have developed a mechanism for preserving anonymity in encrypted messaging – which conceals message content but might not cloak the sender’s identity – while simultaneously blocking unwanted or abusive messages.

Doctoral student and co-lead author Nirvan Tyagi presented the group’s paper, “Orca: Blocklisting in Sender-Anonymous Messaging,” at the 31st USENIX (Advanced Computing Systems Association) Symposium, held Aug. 10-12 in Boston.

By Tom Fleischman for the Cornell Chronicle

Mitigating abuses of encrypted social media communication, on outlets such as WhatsApp and Signal, while ensuring user privacy is a massive challenge on a range of fronts, including technological, legal and social.

A five-year, $3 million National Science Foundation grant to a multidisciplinary team of Cornell researchers aims to take early but significant steps on that arduous journey toward safe, secure online communication.