Year: 2003
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Swarthmore Students Re-Publish Diebold Memos
A group of Swarthmore students has published a damning series of internal memos from electronic-voting vendor Diebold. The memos appear to document cavalier treatment of security issues by Diebold, and the use of non-certified software in real elections. Diebold, claiming that the students are infringing copyright, has sent a series of DMCA takedown letters to…
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Rescorla on Airport ID Checks
Eric Rescorla, at Educated Guesswork, notes a flaw in the security process at U.S. airports – the information used to verify a passenger’s ID is not the same information used to look them up in a suspicious-persons database. Let’s say that you’re a dangerous Canadian terrorist, bearing the clearly suspicious name “Guy Lafleur”. Now, the…
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Warning Fatigue
One of the many problems facing security engineers is warning fatigue – the tendency of users who have seen too many security warnings to start ignoring the warnings altogether. Good designers think carefully about every warning they display, knowing that each added warning will dilute the warnings that were already there. Warning fatigue is a…
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Reading the Broadcast Flag Rules
With the FCC apparently about to announce Broadcast Flag rules, there has been a flurry of letters to the FCC and legislators about the harm such rules would do. The Flag is clearly a bad idea. It will raise the price of digital TV decoders; and it will retard innovation in decoder design; but it…
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Recommended Reading
Ernest Miller, who has written lots of great stuff for LawMeme, now has his very own blog at importance.typepad.com.
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SunnComm's Latest
SunnComm is now taking yet another position regarding Alex Halderman’s paper – that the paper is just “political activism masquerading as research”. (The quote comes from SunnComm president Peter Jacobs, responding to a question from Seth Finkelstein.) Jacobs had expressed the same sentiment earlier, on an investor discussion board, in this vitriolic message, which he…
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SunnComm Says It Won't Sue Halderman
SunnComm, which had previously said it planned to sue Alex Halderman for publishing a critique of SunnComm’s CD anti-copying technology, has now backed off. According to Josh Brodie’s story in today’s Daily Princetonian, SunnComm president Peter Jacobs has now said the company has changed its mind and will not sue. SunnComm is to be commended…
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SunnComm Responds
Hiawatha Bray’s story in today’s Boston Globe reports on SunnComm’s response to Alex Halderman’s dissection of SunnComm’s CD copy-protection technology. ”There’s nothing in his report that’s surprising,” said SunnComm president Bill Whitmore. ”There’s nothing in the report that I’m concerned about.” Whitmore said his company’s system is simply supposed to give honest music lovers a…
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Fixing Trusted Computing
The EFF has posted a very nice piece (apparently written by Seth Schoen) on “trusted computing” systems. The piece makes two important contributions to the debate. First, it gives the best simple introduction to trusted computing technologies that I have seen. Second, it suggests “owner override,” a technological tweak that would largely eliminate the downside…
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Halderman Dissects New CD Copy Protection
Alex Halderman has published an interesting technical report analyzing the newest CD “copy protection” technology. Alex, who is a graduate student here in Princeton’s computer science department, also wrote the definitive paper on the previous generation of CD copy protection. Alex’s paper explains how the SunnComm technology works and why it won’t help the record…