Combating the Effects of Cyber-Psychosis: Using Object Security to Facilitate Critical Thinking

TL;DR

The paper addresses the erosion of critical thinking from information overload, terming it Cyber-Psychosis, and proposes a generalized object security service layer to ground online reasoning. It argues that securing digital objects—through origin authentication, provenance (including process provenance), lifetimes, and confidentiality—can counter deceptive online content and support rational decision-making, even amid algorithmic manipulation. By surveying established protocols (C2PA, S/MIME, PGP, DNSSEC, DNS/DANE, RPKI, Authenticode) and mapping them to six key protections, the authors provide a practical roadmap and identify gaps, particularly in evaluability and broad provenance. The work advocates interdisciplinary collaboration and a tactical path to combine existing protections, enabling secure-by-default objects that foster a more reliable shared reality on the Internet.

Abstract

Humanity is currently facing an existential crisis about the nature of truth and reality driven by the availability of information online which overloads and overwhelms our cognitive capabilities, which we call Cyber-Psychosis. The results of this Cyber-Psychosis include the decline of critical thinking coupled with deceptive influences on the Internet which have become so prolific that they are challenging our ability to form a shared understanding of reality in either the digital or physical world. Fundamental to mending our fractured digital universe is establishing the ability to know where a digital object (i.e. a piece of information like text, audio, or video) came from, whether it was modified, what it is derived from, where it has been circulated, and what (if any) lifetime that information should have. Furthermore, we argue that on-by-default object security for genuine objects will provide the necessary grounding to support critical thinking and rational online behavior, even with the ubiquity of deceptive content. To this end, we propose that the Internet needs an object security service layer. This proposition may not be as distant as it may first seem. Through an examination of several venerable (and new) protocols, we show how pieces of this problem have already been addressed. While interdisciplinary research will be key to properly crafting the architectural changes needed, here we propose an approach for how we can already use fallow protections to begin turning the tide of this emerging Cyber-Psychosis today!

Figures (3)

• Figure 1: C2PA provenance and integrity is implemented by Manifests.
• Figure 2: DNSSEC's hierarchical namespace enables secure key learning.
• Figure 3: Authenticode protects objects through an X.509 delegation hierarchy.