Vaulting the Archive//Destroying the Archive twin open workshops.
When? Thursday, March 10 2016, 10.00-12.00
Where? The communal 5th floor study space in Niagara (Nordenskiöldsgatan 1, Malmö).
What? Data handling dilemmas plague, or should plague, research today: how can one strive to keep one’s research data (and therefore oneself and one’s research co-participants) safe and secure, protected from undesirable actor(s) procuring unauthorized access. The first workshop (10.00-11.00), Vaulting the Archive, will initiate with a discussion of potential data strengthening measures in the form of separate file and wholesale drive encryption measures one may take to protect one’s data archive. After exploring said rudimentary encryption methodologies, the workshop will progress to further address more elaborate security protocols which may be established to facilitate the vaulting of an archive via an exploration of concepts integral to assuring data integrity such as the dead man’s switch, the warrant canary, and deniable encryption.
Data protection, however, doesn’t end with best storage practices, but must extend through to its ultimate destruction: how can discarded data likewise be protected from compromise? Thus the second, conjoining workshop (11.00-12.00), Destroying the Archive, will focus on both digital and physical data destruction. Forensic data recovery procedures will be discussed, as will, in turn, counter-forensic measures which may be used to foil said recovery techniques, likewise be explored to achieve the hypothesized goal of total data protection. Practical hypothetical thought exercises posed may be along the lines of ‘why may it not be enough to simply delete a file?’, ‘why may burning or shredding a document not be sufficient?’, and so on.
These are open workshops to potentially explore and share relevant skill-sets anyone may have.
Students, colleagues, and everyone both inside, outside, and in-between the university are all very, very, welcome!
Update: the workshop slides are now available here.