Joel Samper and Bernardo Ferreira, LASIGE researchers, have published a paper titled “SoK: Self-Generated Nudes over Private Chats: How Can Technology Contribute to a Safer Sexting?”, in the Proceedings of the 46th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP’25), a top cybersecurity conference (Core A*).
The paper studies how technology can help improve the security and privacy of users who exchange self-generated nudes over private online conversations. The number of victims of cyberbullying, sextortion and related crimes has been increasing at an alarming rate worldwide, especially amongst most vulnerable communities including teenagers and women. As such, the paper builds a user-centric sexting threat model from prior studies and then explores how diverse technologies can contribute with security, privacy and/or accountability benefits to users. To do so, it performs a systematic literature review of over 10.026 academic papers and grey literature, combined with a survey of 52 dating, messaging and social apps, from which a taxonomy of safer-sexting approaches is constructed. Finally, it provides take-away lessons with directions for future app development, academic research, and policy making.