Digital Security For All

This research area addresses the question of whether security technologies can be truly inclusive and offer protection to all. Digital technology has moved beyond the controlled environments of corporate and government settings, and it is now ubiquitous in every aspect of life: political, social, corporate and institutional. All parts of society – from welfare claimants to school children and grandparents - are now expected to be on-line and this presents a real challenge to those tasked with ensuring cyber security: how do they engage people across a broad social spectrum and achieve secure practices in the context of diverse day-to-day experiences? 

Bringing the study of technological security into conversation with social and political theories of security, this research area has four main activities:  i) Design of participatory practices that uncover day-to-day security experiences ii) Development of accessible security technologies iii) Study of security practices in the use of everyday essential digital services (such as housing, welfare, healthcare and finance) iv) Critical examination of the social, economic and political conditions and institutions that give rise to digital insecurities.

Grounded in critical humanities and critical security scholarship, this research area has pioneered the use of creative engagement methods to uncover day-to-day security experiences and these methods have been adopted by NCSC as part of their You Shape Security programme. This area of research also contributes to the emerging policy area of safer digital inclusion within the UK government’s digital infrastructure programme.

• Lizzie Coles-Kemp

• Lizzie Coles-Kemp. Inclusive Security: Digital Security Meets Web Science. Foundations and Trends® in Web Science 7, no. 2 (2020): 88-241.
• Lizzie Coles-Kemp, and Rikke Bjerg Jensen. Accessing a new land: Designing for a social conceptualisation of access. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 1-12. 2019.
• Lizzie Coles-Kemp, Debi Ashenden and Kieron O'Hara. Why Should I? Cybersecurity, the Security of the State and the Insecurity of the Citizen. Politics and Governance 6, no. 2 (2018): 41-48.
• Lizzie Coles-Kemp, and René Rydhof Hansen. Walking the line: The everyday security ties that bind. In International Conference on Human Aspects of Information Security, Privacy, and Trust, pp. 464-480. Springer, Cham, 2017.
• Lizzie Coles-Kemp, Alf Zugenmaier, and Makayla Lewis. Watching You Watching Me: The Art of Playing the Panopticon. Digital Enlightenment Yearbook 2014: Social Networks and Social Machines, Surveillance and Empowerment 147 (2014).
• Paul Dunphy, John Vines, Lizzie Coles-Kemp, Rachel Clarke, Vasilis Vlachokyriakos, Peter Wright, John McCarthy, Patrick Olivier. Understanding the experience-centeredness of security and privacy technologies. In Proc. of the New Security Paradigms Workshop (NSPW), vol. 10, no. 2683467.2683475. 2014.