TAPESTRY: Trust, Authentication and Privacy over a DeCentralised Social Registry

Funder: EPSRC

Team: Jo Briggs, Jamie Steane and Arthi Manohar (Design, Northumbria University); John Collomosse (PI), Yifan Yang and Dan Cooper (CVSSP), Mark Manulis and Catalyn Dragan (Centre of Cyber Security) and Klaus Mossneur (5G Innovation Centre) – all University of Surrey; Wendy Moncur, Helen Jones and Mark Adams (Social Digital, University of Dundee); project partners include: Bristows LLB, Enterprise M3

Website: http://www.tapestry.ac.uk

Timeframe: 2017-2020

TAPESTRY investigates and demonstrates new ways to enable people, businesses and services to make better decisions about who they should trust online, by exploiting the ‘tapestry’ of multimodal signals woven by everyday digital interaction. Research outcomes include social science work at Dundee exploring user attitudes and behaviours around trust, to inform the design of the prototype platform; and visual design ­at Northumbria exploring ways to communicate an impression of the provenance that an online identity holds. The Surrey team has developed machine-learning algorithms that derive provenance information from longitudinal social media streams, encrypt and store its ‘essence’ as trust evidence in a blockchain application, and generate a ‘provenance visualisation’ in real time. The ­­prototype technology has been trialled at workshops in Newcastle and Surrey to evaluate its acceptability and efficacy in helping people decide on the legitimacy of an online identity. Supplementary research concerns developing and trialing design workshop approache­s towards promoting understanding amongst multidisciplinary research teams developing ‘opaque’ technologies. The wider team has presented insights into trust online and accounts of the technology to several government departments.

Yifan Yang, John Collomosse, Arthi Manohar, Jo Briggs and Jamie Steane. 2018. TAPESTRY: Visualizing Interwoven Identities for Trust Provenance. VizSec 2018, IEEE Symposium on Visualization for Cyber Security.

Arthi Manohar and Jo Briggs (2018) Designing In With Black Box Technologies and PD. In: Design Research Society 2018 Conference: Catalyst, 25-28 June 2018, Limerick.

Chris Elsden, Arthi  Manohar, Jo Briggs, Mike Harding, Chris Speed, and John Vines, Making Sense of Blockchain Applications: A Typology for HCI, CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’18). ACM, p. 458

Arthi Manohar and Jo Briggs (2018) Identity Management in the Age of Blockchain 3.0. In: HCI for Blockchain, workshop in conjunction with CHI’18 (workshop paper). http://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/34110/