Category: Privacy & Security
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New Voting Machine Purchases Should Be VVSG 2.0 Certified
Summary: All the voting machines that counties and states bought before 2025 complied with standards (e.g., VVSG 1.0 or 1.1) that were extremely weak on cybersecurity, and indeed most of those voting systems were easy to hack (make them cheat in elections) and their back-end databases were easy to alter (to change vote totals). Now…
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Meet the Researcher: Miranda Wei
Miranda Wei studies online abuse and societal factors in sociotechnical safety, especially concerning social media, gender, and interpersonal relationships. Their research interests lie at the intersections of computer security and privacy (S&P), human-computer interaction (HCI), and feminist science and technology studies (STS). Wei recently sat down with Princeton undergraduate Grace Ding ’29 to discuss their…
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Georgia still using tragicomically insecure voting system
Don’t leave your car key in the glove compartment. And don’t key all the vehicles in your fleet with the same key, and leave that key in every glove compartment. For over a decade 2004-2018, Georgia was using voting machines so insecure it was like having a fleet of vehicles that didn’t even use keys…
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New Technical Briefing: Digital Fingerprinting
Post authors: Stephanie T. Nguyen and Mihir Kshirsagar We published a technical briefing on device fingerprinting as part of a series of plain-language explainers for regulators on technical topics that arise in their work. The brief walks through how fingerprinting works technically, who provides the technology, and why it is spreading. As third-party cookies face…
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Meet the Researcher: Sophie Luskin
Sophie Luskin is an Emerging Scholar at the Princeton Center for Information Technology (CITP) conducting research on regulation, issues, and impacts around generative AI for companionship, social and peer media platforms, age assurance, and consumer privacy to protect users and promote responsible deployment. Her research has been conducted across policy, legal, journalistic, and communications spaces.…
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Hard Choices: CITP Workshop on Payment Systems at the Global DPI Summit in Capetown, South Africa
Authored by Mihir Kshirsagar, Jeremy McKey, and Felix Chen On November 5, 2025, Princeton CITP and the M.S. Chadha Center for Global India (CGI), in partnership with AfricaNenda, will convene an interactive workshop at the Global DPI Summit 2025 to examine the difficult trade-offs governments face when designing national payment systems. The session, Hard Choices…
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Meet the Researcher: Sam Hafferty
Sam Hafferty is part of the 2024 – 2026 Emerging Scholar Program cohort at the Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP). Hafferty is contributing to work concerning data privacy regulation and broadband equity. Princeton undergraduate Jason Persaud ‘27 recently sat down with Hafferty to discuss how they got started in this type of work,…
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The “Bubble” of Risk: Improving Assessments for Offensive Cybersecurity Agents
Authored by Boyi Wei Most frontier models today undergo some form of safety testing, including whether they can help adversaries launch costly cyberattacks. But many of these assessments overlook a critical factor: adversaries can adapt and modify models in ways that expand the risk far beyond the perceived safety profile that static evaluations capture. At…
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Paper fingerprinting and ballot tracking
In part 1 of this 2-part series I explained: Some election-integrity advocates have suggested that, in addition to good chain-of-custody procedures for ballots between when they’re cast and when they’re counted (or recounted), we should have better control over what paper (and paper ballots) go into the polling place. This way, if fraudulent ballots got…
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Flaky paper won’t secure our elections without a protocol to go with it
Part 1 of a 2-part series. In this part, why just printing ballots on special paper won’t help much. In part 2, how special paper could have a role if the rest of the system were developed to go with it. How can we best ensure that the ballots tallied are the same ones that…