Four short links: 20 December 2019
Homomorphic Encryption, Supply Chain Security, Location Tracking, Cognitive Uncertainty
- ArcaneVM — A Fully Homomorphic Encryption Brainfuck virtual machine. A toy language but implementing a serious idea. It’s a positive sign that homomorphic encryption is spreading. However … Our research shows that there are many security pitfalls in fully homomorphic encryption from the perspective of practical application. The security problems of a fully homomorphic encryption in a real application is more severe than imagined.
- Supply Chain Security: If I were a Nation State (Bunnie Huang) — In this talk, we will calibrate expectations about how difficult (or easy) it may be for actors ranging from rogue individuals to Nation-States to infiltrate various points of our global supply chain.
- One Nation, Tracked (NY Times) — those apps on your phone, the ones that request access to your location, are frequently uploading your location to … well, nobody really knows, but it often ends up aggregated in giant data pools that are analyzed for insights. Or, in this case, leaked to the New York Times. They’re a massive privacy problem.
- Cognitive Uncertainty — This paper introduces a formal definition and an experimental measurement of the concept of cognitive uncertainty: people’s subjective uncertainty about what the optimal action is. This concept allows us to bring together and partially explain a set of behavioral anomalies identified across four distinct domains of decision-making: choice under risk, choice under ambiguity, belief updating, and survey expectations about economic variables. […] Building on existing models of noisy Bayesian cognition, we formally propose that cognitive uncertainty generates these patterns by inducing people to compress probabilities toward a mental default of 50:50. We document experimentally that the responses of individuals with higher cognitive uncertainty indeed exhibit stronger compression of probabilities in choice under risk and ambiguity, belief updating, and survey expectations.
