Achievement

Trainee Matt Tierney's project focuses on Secure Mobile Identities (SMI). The basic idea involves removing any dependence on the GSM security layer and building an application-level identity for applications that reside on a mobile device. Matt had an initial design of this system and an open-source version up and running. After taking Prof. Nissenbaum's "Values in Design" course, Matt started looking at broadening the scope of the project to address the user experience to present to end-users when SMIs are deployed for applications (How do we make bootstrapping and day-to-day operations of SMIs usable for our users? How do we empower users with the ability to account for the usage of their SMIs? Can business that centralize these systems exploit or manipulate users' SMIs?). Ultimately, Matt has expanded the dimensions of the questions that arise from the original purely technical endeavor to include the inter-disciplinary question: How will SMIs be used?