The moment of exchange : risk, vulnerability, responsibility

Any cycle of production and exchange – be it economic, cultural or aesthetic – involves an element of risk. It involves uncertainty, unpredictability, and a potential for new insight and innovation (the boom) as well as blockages, crises and breakdown (the bust). In performance, the risks are plentiful – economic, political, social, physical and psychological. The risks people are willing to take depend on their position in the exchange (performer, producer, venue manager or spectator), and their aesthetic preferences. This paper considers the often uncertain, confronting or ‘risky’ moment of exchange between performer, spectator and culture in Live Art practices. Encompassing body art, autobiographical art, site-specific art and other sorts of performative intervention in the public sphere, Live Art eschews the artifice of theatre, breaking down barriers between art and life, artist and spectator, to speak back to the public sphere, and challenge assumptions about bodies, identities, memories, relationships and histories. In the process, Live Art frequently privileges an uncertain, confrontational or ‘risky’ mode of exchange between performer, spectator and culture, as a way of challenging power structures. This paper examines the moment of exchange in terms of risk, vulnerability, responsibility and ethics. Why the romance with ‘risky’ behaviours and exchanges? Who is really taking a risk? What risk? With whose permission (or lack thereof)? What potential does a ‘risky’ exchange hold to destabilise aesthetic, social or political norms? Where lies the fine line between subversive intervention in the public sphere and sheer self-indulgence? What are the social and ethical implications of a moment of exchange that puts bodies, beliefs or social boundaries at ‘risk’? In this paper, these questions are addressed with reference to historical and contemporary practices under the broadly defined banner of Live Art, from the early work of Abrovamic and Burden, through to contemporary Australian practitioners like Fiona McGregor.

Multi-factor password-authenticated key exchange

We consider a new form of authenticated key exchange which we call multi-factor password-authenticated key exchange, where session establishment depends on successful authentication of multiple short secrets that are complementary in nature, such as a long-term password and a one-time response, allowing the client and server to be mutually assured of each other's identity without directly disclosing private information to the other party. Multi-factor authentication can provide an enhanced level of assurance in higher-security scenarios such as online banking, virtual private network access, and physical access because a multi-factor protocol is designed to remain secure even if all but one of the factors has been compromised. We introduce a security model for multi-factor password-authenticated key exchange protocols, propose an efficient and secure protocol called MFPAK, and provide a security argument to show that our protocol is secure in this model. Our security model is an extension of the Bellare-Pointcheval-Rogaway security model for password-authenticated key exchange and accommodates an arbitrary number of symmetric and asymmetric authentication factors.