Episode 3 (2024) Sylvain Besençon: Information security and the care of open cryptography technology

We are happy to hear back from Sylvain Besençon from University
of Fribourg, who wraps up research we learned about in 2020 about
caring for open source cryptography.

This paper suggests a shift from information security as a matter
of war to security as matter of care. Based on my 6-year long PhD
research among a community of open source hackers and developers
maintaining a crypto protocol, this paper deconstructs what I
call the “warlike crypto imaginary” that often represents
cryptography as a fascinating totem pole in the form of a blue
lock. This paper tackles the rhetoric of war and violence that
shapes our binary understanding of information security and
proposes the work of making and unmaking security as a question
of care, collaboration and negotiations. In other words, rather
than portraying hackers and security experts as lonely teenagers
wearing hoodies and deemed to break things, brute force
passwords, and penetrate systems, this paper looks at how
security people keep collaborating one with another to fixing
things that never cease to break.


Inspired by the feminist STS field, I look for a “different
voice” (Gilligan, 1982) through an ethnographic case study
focused on the maintenance of an old crypto protocol called
Pretty Good Privacy (PGP). PGP was developed in 1991 by an
antinuclear activist to protect emails from being spied on. Since
then, and despite many controversies, different generations of
coders have been maintaining this piece of technology for more
than three decades. Their persistent, engaged and humble
tinkering let me identify values that steer the community towards
careful and dedicated practices of maintenance, long-term
collaborations, negotiations of compromises, and affective
attachment to the technology.

This episode is a live recording from Hacker Cultures! The
Podcast Panel Season 3 panel organized at the European
Association for the study of Science and Technology and Society
for Social Studies of Science EASST/4S 2024
conference in Amsterdam on 2024-07-16. The hosts are Paula
Bialski, Andreas Bischof and Mace Ojala. Audio production by
Heights Beats at Hotmilk Records, who also produced the theme
track. We are grateful for Chemnitz University of Technology for
funding.