Description
Threats to the cyber security of systems usually rely on subterfuge to undermine trust in systems. To gain access to a digital system, the programmer of an exploit must trick the human user, or the system, into thinking that the code has legitimate authority for access. Here, 'trust' is predominantly viewed as a social or a psychological accomplishment, a matter of fooling humans who are often designated as “the weakest link”, or as a technical matter of verifiable engineering standards. However, this is a one-sided perspective. By comparing contemporary cyber operations with cryptography practices during WW2, this paper will show how trust is also profoundly mediated with and by ‘things’ as much as bodied labour, to highlight a more structural account. By shifting away from purely intentional conceptions of subterfuge and trust, such an approach will sketch how arrangements of humans and machines are each productive parts of the machineries of knowledge and secrecy production. The richer and less agent-centred theorisation of trust and subterfuge proposed by this paper can thus challenge some of the novelty claims of contemporary cybersecurity discourses, whilst also contributing to recent more structural accounts of secrecy and cognate concepts.
