While cryptography is often positioned as inherently pro-social, its methods and deployments can have both beneficial and harmful effects on users and society. Despite the dual-use nature of cryptographic research, it remains unclear whether the cryptographic community shares a common operational account of the ethical responsibilities its researchers adhere to. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 20 cryptography researchers, spanning theory and applied cryptography, and including junior and senior community members. Using qualitative data analysis, we examine how participants relate their research to ethics, the role of normative and ethical considerations in motivating their work, and how they reflect on the broader social and political responsibility of cryptography. Our findings indicate that ethics in cryptographic research is largely implicit, distributed, and conditional rather than explicit. Ethical considerations rarely serve as primary motivations; instead, they emerge situationally, shaped by proximity to application, and by uncertainty about downstream impact. Considerations of responsibility and public good are present but articulated unevenly across participants and contexts. Drawing on participants' perspectives, we outline actionable recommendations and community-level mechanisms, such as venue-specific guidance and repositories of exemplar cases, that encourage ethical reflection and responsibility in cryptographic research while addressing researchers' concerns about potential constraints on scientific progress.
ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS)
2026-11-15
2026-10-14