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Explaining Cybersecurity with Films and the Arts

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Imagine Math 7

Abstract

There are a large number of movies, TV series, novels, short stories, and even plays about cybersecurity and, in particular, about hackers. Some are good, some are so-so, most are frankly quite bad. Some are realistic, most make cybersecurity experts cringe. In this paper, I discuss how a number of basic cybersecurity notions (and even several advanced ones) can be explained with the help of some well-known popular movies and other artworks, and some perhaps less obvious ones. I focus in particular on anonymity, pseudonymity, and authentication, but similar explanations can be given for other security properties, for the algorithms, protocols, and systems that have been developed to achieve such properties, and for the vulnerabilities and attacks that they suffer from.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the King’s Together Multi and Interdisciplinary Research Scheme, King’s College London, UK.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Informatics, King’s College London, London, UK

    Luca Viganò

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  1. Luca Viganò
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Correspondence to Luca Viganò .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. IVSLA – Istituto Veneto di Scienze Lettere ed Arti, Roma, Italy

    Michele Emmer

  2. Mathematics Department, University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy

    Marco Abate

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Viganò, L. (2020). Explaining Cybersecurity with Films and the Arts. In: Emmer, M., Abate, M. (eds) Imagine Math 7. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42653-8_18

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