Two senior technical directors at GCHQ, the UK’s cyber intelligence agency, have published a new paper analysing how technology companies could protect children from sexual abuse online.
The impact of child sexual abuse can last a lifetime even if the abuse takes place online. Research by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse found survivors often suffer serious physical and mental health conditions in later life.
One of the challenges in tackling this online abuse is the growing number of services offering end-to-end encryption, technology which often undermines the existing safety features that many companies use to detect child sexual abuse material.
But without using end-to-end encryption, any hacker or even lawful authority – and perhaps even workers at the messaging company – who could access the service’s internal controls would be able to read those messages.
Read more: Danielle Armitage waives her anonymity to warn others about what happened to her when she was just 14
The new paper is written by Dr Ian Levy, technical director at the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) – a part of GCHQ – and Crispin Robinson, the technical director cryptanalysis at GCHQ, both trained mathematicians and career intelligence officers whose work involves tackling child sexual abuse online.
They describe seven “harm archetypes” to frame the problem in a new way, covering everything from children being groomed by offenders through to adults sharing indecent images of children out of shock, and note how each of these harmful behaviours has a particular technical profile that can be addressed in a specific way.
‘Child sexual abuse is a societal problem’
In particular it recommends revisiting a recent controversial proposal by Apple of pre-emptively scanning all iPhones for child sexual abuse material (CSAM) as a…
Source : skynews
