Ivy Turk

Academic Site for Ivy Turk

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Home // Publications // Academic and Employment History // Teaching Experience // Project Ideas

Notice: I’ve had multiple affiliations with different project lengths, but most ideas here can be adjusted to fit these varying timescales. The suggested timescale for some projects is indicated with [N months], for example [3] indicates a three month project.

While I have previously supervised more technical projects, this list has recently been shortened to better fit my present areas of expertise.

Tool Creation

• Designing and implementing novel safety tools to aid those experiencing various t
  • [3-6] Evidence gathering tools. Goal is an application which provides secure storage of information and media even if the device itself is compromised (e.g. domestic abuse scenarios where the partner has access to the phone). Our prior work on vault apps is here as possible inspiration. Possible extensions could look into ensuring digital evidence is admissible in court, or at least providing integrity and authenticity.
  • Covert information sharing tools. Simple implementations [3] could set up a private channel for communications with trusted third parties, or extended versions [6] could implement either existing crypto protocols for secure (+anonymous?) comms or have a go at designing your own and attempting to break it. Extensions could include authenticating endpoints are not compromised (e.g. shared phones) or designing a system for police or NGO contact.
• Any prototype implementation with evaluation for novel privacy and safety tools. Some suggestions might be
  • Location privacy and spoofing, building off of novel suggestions from our unwanted trackers research or other contexts.
  • Shared access home systems (such as IoT networks) and compartmentalisation, designing for multiple superuser environments and/or allowing for delegation of access controls while considering adversarial scenarios
  • Abuse escape planning tools.

System Evaluation

• [3] Evaluating any existing tools (ideas above) for safety, security, usability.
  • [3] Usability: Either run a usability study with established methods (heuristic evaluation/Nielson principles, cognotive walkthrough, talk-aloud or task-based user studies) or design an evaluation scenario to test usability, such as our past gameified research on trackers and IoT.
  • [3] Safety: Explore the potential misuse of tools using threat modelling and similar methods. Suggested to build off of the HARMS framework.

  • Security: Break things (see disclaimer below) to identify security issues with deployed tools. Likely to be more of a red teaming/bug bounty style approach than formalised project, although I got away with that for my own master’s thesis.

  • [3] Port scanning e.g. Nmap or extensions looking at firewall probing etc
  • Repository scanning for API keys, passwords, secrets etc