Cryptogame: The Guardians of the Galaxy Use End-to-End Encryption

[ UUID ] 2c7b6c76-2689-4063-94b3-aa6958ff8ef7

[ Session Name ] Cryptogame: The Guardians of the Galaxy Use End-to-End Encryption [ Primary Space ] Privacy and Security [ Secondary Space ] Web Literacy

[ Submitter's Name ] David Kohan [ Submitter's Affiliated Organisation ] King's College London, UK

[ Other Facilitator 1's Name ] Ruba Abu-Salma [ Other Facilitator 1's GitHub ] RAbu-Salma

[ Other Facilitator 2's Name ] Vasilios Mavroudis [ Other Facilitator 2's GitHub ] mavroudisv

[ Other Facilitator 3's Name ] Katerina Tsarava

What will happen in your session?

Our session is essentially a collaborative game with participants. The game is based on our “gaming” framework and aims to intuitively motivate and teach complex concepts through a set of challenges. In this case, we will focus on end-to-end encryption schemes. Participants are split into 3 or 4 teams (depending on the attendance) and aim to find the password for the locked treasure-chest that is secured in the middle of the room. All communication between participants and teams happens through bottled messages that are visible to everyone (including the opposing teams). As the teams progress through the challenges, they incrementally start to use more complex schemes, eventually reconstructing some popular schemes used in real world cryptographic applications.

What is the goal or outcome of your session?

We want to motivate the use of End-to-End Encryption (EE2E), help participants create correct mental models of E2EE tools, and introduce some common encryption schemes in practice. We use Game-based learning to increase the audience engagement, especially as Data/Communication Security and Cryptography is a complex and involved topic. During the game even non-experts will build an intuition around the topic, which will be later put in practice as the players move forward to more advanced challenges, while trying to avoid leaking data to opposing teams. During the game we will study in depth only specific schemes, but we will also provide some quick intermittent slide-breaks to skim through broader areas of application to further intrigue the audience.

Time needed

90 mins