Moving Forward, Building an Ethics Community (Panel Statements)

The organizing question around which this panel at WECSR 2011 rallied was how to move toward building a nation-state-agnostic ethics community in computer security research. 1 Ethics As a Three-Legged Stool To jumpstart the discourse, panel moderator Erin Kenneally framed the issue of ethics in computer security research as a metaphorical threelegged stool consisting of principles, the applications of principles, and implementation of those applications. Accepting that model, the problems that define the current state of affairs of ethics in computer security research expose frailties along each of the three appendages, as well as that of a domain-agnostic yet nebulous fourth limb. Specifically, the security research community and the larger domain of information and communication technology research (e.g., network measurement, computer-human interface, software engineering) lack shared community values guiding principles around which ’right and wrong’ research conduct can be assessed, systematized, influenced, and defended[3]. The growth and persistence of debate among relevant conference program committees over the ethical propriety of certain research offers a glimpse of this disharmony. Arguably, the problem may be less one of disagreement over principles than a failure to galvanize principles into a coherent delivery vehicle. Moving on to the second leg of the ethics stool, the community is faced with a dearth of domain guidance and technical enablers to translate the abstract and theoretical ethics principles into practicable actions. Specifically, there is a lack of both formal institutional and ad hoc peer guidance in ethical decision management, thereby reinforcing the vacuum within which first order ethics principles are embraced at the community-level. ? Copyright c © 2011, IFCA. Primary source of publication is http://www.spinger.de/comp/lncs/index.html