Isolating Insecurely: A Call to Arms for the Security and Privacy Community During the Time of COVID-19
Let’s begin by saying this was not the letter I had originally planned on writing. However, I have the dubious distinction of writing this piece while the world is dealing with the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. As I write this note, well over 1 million confirmed cases have been reported, and tens of thousands of people have died from the disease. Surely those figures will have risen substantially by the time this column will be published. Very thankfully, hundreds of thousands more who were positively diagnosed have now recovered.
Undeniably, our first duty is to keep ourselves, our families, our communities, and the general public around the world safe by following shelter-in-place rules and other, related public health measures, in order to contain the outbreak. Beyond that key measure, what else can the rest of us be doing to help improve the situation, perhaps beyond donating compute cycles on our laptops to the “Folding@home” COVID-19 effort [1]?