(THE REGISTER) — What if, instead of trying to control the sale of guns – a political impossibility in America – weapon use were enforced by a complex combination of electronics, WiFi communications and policy enforcement?
That’s what researchers from the University of Delaware are proposing, asking in essence whether technology offers a way to hack around the Second Amendment. In this paper at Arxiv, Marcos Portnoi and Chien-Chung Shen of the university’s Department of Computer and Information Science propose a combination of wireless security and encrypted broadcast to enforce gun safety.
Wireless-Delimited Secure Zones with Encrypted Attribute-Based Broadcast for Safe Firearms draws on the idea that if computers are now reliable enough for cars, medicine and fly-by-wire aircraft, they are probably reliable enough to provide a framework to cut down mass shootings.
The idea isn’t brand-new, as the authors note. Their addition to the research is to propose what they call a “context-aware system in the firearm” that can draw on information from sensors in the environment to make safety decisions.
