Explaining The Role of Cryptography During COVID-19 [A DIY Guide]

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a funny title. It starts with how, whereas when you read it you probably wondered why.

But let’s start at the beginning: why am I writing this story?

I represent an organization founded in 1998 called CrypTool (I wasn’t even born at that time. The only thing I know is that France 🇫🇷 won the world cup).

Since then, CrypTool have been developing software to learn cryptography. But, recently, CrypTool has decided to merge with another organization called… CrypTools, co-founded by… me. I assure you the name was a coincidence. And so, CrypTool became an Australo-Canado-German organization (yeah, I know, it rocks!).

Previously, CrypTool focused on (university) students, and CrypTools on developers and young people. And if we were to merge, then we had to embrace each other’s differences. That means broadening our audience.

The recent coronavirus crisis has given us the opportunity to extend our impact by explaining contact tracing mechanisms.

That’s how we started working on it.

1. Understanding the protocols

That was the first task in our plan. And it wasn’t an easy one. Reading is easy, but understanding is something else, because we had to go through every technical documents, and try to figure out what they meant.

And if it wasn't enough, they were two different main protocols that had a high chance of being used in the real world: DP-3T (made by international researchers, but supported by Europe) and Exposure Notification (made by Google & Apple).

While they look similar, they’re actually very different. And because we didn't know which one was going to used by most countries, we had to find similarities between them to try explaining both as well as possible.

2. Implementing those protocols

We’re all computer scientists, and for us we have to code to learn something. In our case, we also wanted to teach, so we had to implement the 2 different protocols.

By doing this, we could experiment with them instead of relying on the documents given by the press or the companies behind DP-3T (yes, we know they're not really part of a company) or Exposure Notification.

So, we asked one of our team member to make a web app to try them. You can now visit it here, but if you’re not a “Crypto Guru”, we recommend not clicking on this link 😂. Anyway, we’ll come back to it later. All this work was made possible by one of our experts, Sven Rech.

3. Making things accessible so anyone can understand

It may seem like the simplest part, but it’s actually the hardest part, because you have to put yourself in the shoes of people who don’t understand anything about cryptography.

The idea was to make an attractive site, with simple texts, and available in several languages.

That’s where I come in. As a web-designer/developer, I had experience in making not too ugly websites. I started, with the help of my colleagues at CrypTools in Australia, to create graphics and mock-ups of different parts of the site.

The landing page

Then, I started think of other experience we can bring to our visitors. I asked some of the members and we thought it was a good idea to make a small app to simulate what could be happening in a real situation. So I started developing a web app that does just that. I took inspiration from the work of 3Blue1Brown when he simulates the COVID-19 pandemic. With the help of CodePen, Red Bull and patience (especially patience actually), I had a pretty good looking result:

Animation / Simulation

Finally, we combined everything into one single page, so it’s easy for anyone to just visit the page, learn, and try our simulation.

I would love if you could visit the page and share the link with your friend to spread the word! https://corona-tracing.cryptool.org

And actually we even bought 2 other domains ( corona-tracing.org and corona-tracing.info) so it’s easier to spread the word.

What did we learn from this?

In fact, a lot of things. Firstly, the fact that to share knowledge, you don’t just need to have a vague idea of what it is, but you have to understand everything in order to be able to explain it to anyone. One of my favorite Einstein phrases is:

If you can’t explain a concept to a six year old, you don’t fully understand it.

And I think he’s absolutely right. One thing We also learned is that you have to put yourself in this 6-year-old’s shoes to be able to explain things better.

I think that we achieved our goal, and that we’re going in the right direction with our merger.

Previously published at https://medium.com/@arthur_guiot/how-to-explain-the-role-of-cryptography-during-covid-19-438b12d2ca60