Author: Andrew Appel
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My testimony before the House Subcommittee on IT
I was invited to testify yesterday before the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Information Technology, at a hearing entitled “Cybersecurity: Ensuring the Integrity of the Ballot Box.” My written testimony is available here. My 5-minute opening statement went as follows: My name is Andrew Appel. I am Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University. …
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Which voting machines can be hacked through the Internet?
Over 9000 jurisdictions (counties and states) in the U.S. run elections with a variety of voting machines: optical scanners for paper ballots, and direct-recording “touchscreen” machines. Which ones of them can be hacked to make them cheat, to transfer votes from one candidate to another? The answer: all of them. An attacker with physical access…
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Security against Election Hacking – Part 2: Cyberoffense is not the best cyberdefense!
State and county election officials across the country employ thousands of computers in election administration, most of them are connected (from time to time) to the internet (or exchange data cartridges with machines that are connected). In my previous post I explained how we must audit elections independently of the computers, so we can trust the…
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Security against Election Hacking – Part 1: Software Independence
There’s been a lot of discussion of whether the November 2016 U.S. election can be hacked. Should the U.S. Government designate all the states’ and counties’ election computers as “critical cyber infrastructure” and prioritize the “cyberdefense” of these systems? Will it make any difference to activate those buzzwords with less than 3 months until the…
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Internet Voting? Really?
Recently I gave a TEDx talk—I spoke at the local Princeton University TEDx event. My topic was voting: America’s voting systems in the 19th and 20th century, and should we vote using the Internet? You can see the talk here:
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Internet Voting, Utah GOP Primary Election
Utah’s Republican presidential primary was conducted today by Internet. If you have your voter-registration PIN, or even if you don’t, visit https://ivotingcenter.gop and you will learn something about Internet voting!
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Apple/FBI: Freedom of speech vs. compulsion to sign
This week I signed the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s amicus (friend-of-the-court) brief in the Apple/FBI iPhone-unlocking lawsuit. Many prominent computer scientists and cryptographers signed: Josh Aas, Hal Abelson, Judy Anderson, Andrew Appel, Tom Ball (the Google one, not the Microsoft one), Boaz Barak, Brian Behlendorf, Rich Belgard, Dan Bernstein, Matt Bishop, Josh Bloch, Fred Brooks, Mark Davis,…
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Freedom to Tinker on the Radio
Today on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s CBC Radio show, “The Current”, a 20-minute segment about the freedom to tinker: “Arrested, for tinkering. Young Ahmed Mohamed likes to take things apart, cross wires, experiment… and put things back together again. It’s the kind of hobby that once led to companies like…say, Apple and Microsoft. But is…
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A clear line between offense and defense
The New York Times, in an editorial today entitled “Arms Control for a Cyberage“, writes, The problem is that unlike conventional weapons, with cyberweapons “there’s no clear line between offense and defense,” as President Obama noted this month in an interview with Re/code, a technology news publication. Defense in cyberwarfare consists of pre-emptively locating the…
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Ed Felten elected to National Academy
The National Academy of Engineering announced today that Edward W. Felten, professor of computer science and public affairs, and director, Center for Information Technology Policy, Princeton University, Princeton, N.J., has been elected to the National Academy “For contributions to security of computer systems, and for impact on public policy.” From the NAE’s announcement: Election to…