be done anonymously online

16 Grand Challenges

In this section we describe some “grand challenges” that we will need to face in the next few years. These challenges require the collaboration of hundreds of people from several different realms of science. Most of these challenges not only involve novel research, but also need appropriate regulation and possibly legal frameworks in place. We hope that the funding agencies will provide support to these areas and that the research community will start working towards these challenges.

16.1 Give users assurance about the security of their devices

Most computing devices today offer little, if any, assurance about the level of security they provide. Although some of them (such as medical devices) may adhere to safety standards, most of them do not adhere to any security standards at all. As a result, they provide no guarantees to their users: they may crash at any time; they may get compromised at any time; they may turn hostile at any time. We believe that we should provide users with (i) better transparency and (ii) better guarantees about the security of their devices. Although this sounds like a task that can be achieved through regulation, it has significant research and development dimensions including continuous monitoring, aggressive penetration testing, and continuous bug detection to name a few.

16.2 If it can be done anonymously in the offline world, it can also be done anonymously online

Over the past years we have moved several of our everyday activities to cyberspace. The COVID-19 pandemic intensified this trend so that at the peak of the pandemic the only ways to interact with other people involved the digital world at some level. As a result, we started doing all our shopping online,