Katrina Khanta

— On the schedule —

Privacy Is Not the Enemy! What Law Enforcement Misunderstands and What Cryptographers Can Do About It

When law enforcement and researchers discuss threat actors targeting children in online gaming environments, the conversation often arrives at a troubling conclusion where they view privacy as the problem. Dr. Khanta's doctoral research investigating the rise in threat actors leveraging immersive online gaming environments to target children for illicit activities, conducted alongside Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) Task Force professionals across the United States, found that sentiment to be widespread. Many investigators have come to view encryption and privacy protections as barriers to justice rather than rights worth preserving. This talk pushes back on that framing with evidence from the field. Investigators are often already able to build cases and pursue bad actors without ever touching message content or weakening end-to-end encryption. The problem is not that privacy exists. The problem is that platforms have not been designed to surface the signals that are already legally and ethically available, and that the investigative community is largely unaware of how far Privacy Enhancing Cryptography has come. This session makes the case for a path the field has not yet taken. Techniques such as Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKP), Secure Multi-Party Computation (MPC), Private Set Intersection (PSI), and Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) are established cryptographic tools that have not yet been applied to this problem area. The cryptographic community, including those building on libraries such as OpenSSL, are well positioned to close that gap. Protecting children online and protecting everyone's right to privacy are not mutually exclusive. The tools already exist, what is missing is the bridge between the investigative community that needs them and the cryptographic community that builds them. This talk aims to ignite this long overdue conversation.