Private Hierarchical Governance for Encrypted Messaging

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Namavari, Armin, Wang, Barry, Menda, Sanketh, Nassi, Ben, Tyagi, Nirvan, Grimmelmann, James, Zhang, Amy, Ristenpart, Thomas
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Namavari, Armin
Wang, Barry
Menda, Sanketh
Nassi, Ben
Tyagi, Nirvan
Grimmelmann, James
Zhang, Amy
Ristenpart, Thomas
author_facet Namavari, Armin
Wang, Barry
Menda, Sanketh
Nassi, Ben
Tyagi, Nirvan
Grimmelmann, James
Zhang, Amy
Ristenpart, Thomas
contents The increasing harms caused by hate, harassment, and other forms of abuse online have motivated major platforms to explore hierarchical governance. The idea is to allow communities to have designated members take on moderation and leadership duties; meanwhile, members can still escalate issues to the platform. But these promising approaches have only been explored in plaintext settings where community content is public to the platform. It is unclear how one can realize hierarchical governance in the huge and increasing number of online communities that utilize end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) messaging for privacy. We propose private hierarchical governance systems. These should enable similar levels of community governance as in plaintext settings, while maintaining cryptographic privacy of content and governance actions not reported to the platform. We design the first such system, taking a layered approach that adds governance logic on top of an encrypted messaging protocol; we show how an extension to the message layer security (MLS) protocol suffices for achieving a rich set of governance policies. Our approach allows developers to rapidly prototype new governance features, taking inspiration from a plaintext system called PolicyKit. We build a prototype E2EE messaging system called MlsGov that supports content-based community and platform moderation, elections of community moderators, votes to remove abusive users, and more.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_19433
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Private Hierarchical Governance for Encrypted Messaging
Namavari, Armin
Wang, Barry
Menda, Sanketh
Nassi, Ben
Tyagi, Nirvan
Grimmelmann, James
Zhang, Amy
Ristenpart, Thomas
Cryptography and Security
Computers and Society
The increasing harms caused by hate, harassment, and other forms of abuse online have motivated major platforms to explore hierarchical governance. The idea is to allow communities to have designated members take on moderation and leadership duties; meanwhile, members can still escalate issues to the platform. But these promising approaches have only been explored in plaintext settings where community content is public to the platform. It is unclear how one can realize hierarchical governance in the huge and increasing number of online communities that utilize end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) messaging for privacy. We propose private hierarchical governance systems. These should enable similar levels of community governance as in plaintext settings, while maintaining cryptographic privacy of content and governance actions not reported to the platform. We design the first such system, taking a layered approach that adds governance logic on top of an encrypted messaging protocol; we show how an extension to the message layer security (MLS) protocol suffices for achieving a rich set of governance policies. Our approach allows developers to rapidly prototype new governance features, taking inspiration from a plaintext system called PolicyKit. We build a prototype E2EE messaging system called MlsGov that supports content-based community and platform moderation, elections of community moderators, votes to remove abusive users, and more.
title Private Hierarchical Governance for Encrypted Messaging
topic Cryptography and Security
Computers and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.19433