Category: Uncategorized
-
Refuting Diebold's Response
Diebold issued a response to our e-voting report. While we feel our paper already addresses all the issues they raise, here is a point by point rebuttal. Diebold’s statement is in italics, our response in normal type. Three people from the Center for Information Technology Policy and Department of Computer Science at Princeton University today…
-
"Hotel Minibar" Keys Open Diebold Voting Machines
Like other computer scientists who have studied Diebold voting machines, we were surprised at the apparent carelessness of Diebold’s security design. It can be hard to convey this to nonexperts, because the examples are technical. To security practitioners, the use of a fixed, unchangeable encryption key and the blind acceptance of every software update offered…
-
Security Analysis of the Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting Machine
Today, Ari Feldman, Alex Halderman, and I released a paper on the security of e-voting technology. The paper is accompanied by a ten-minute video that demonstrates some of the vulnerabilities and attacks we discuss. Here is the paper’s abstract: Security Analysis of the Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting Machine Ariel J. Feldman, J. Alex Halderman, and Edward…
-
9/11
Five years ago this morning I was in a hotel room in Minneapolis, getting dressed. I flipped on the TV and saw smoke streaming from a skyscraper. Nobody knew yet what it meant. My plan had been to meet a colleague in the lobby and walk over to our meeting. Everybody in the lobby area…
-
E-Voting, Up Close
Recently the Election Science Institute released a fascinating report on real experience with e-voting technologies in a May 2006 primary election in Cuyahoga County, Ohio (which includes Cleveland). The report digs beneath the too-frequent platitudes of the e-voting debates, to see how , poll workers and officials actually use the technology, what really goes wrong…
-
Lost Comments
Yesterday somebody defaced this site. This trashed the database that backs the site, so we had to restore it from a backup. Everything seems to be back to normal, except that any comments submitted after the backup (about two days ago) were lost. Sorry for the inconvenience.
-
Silver Bullet Podcast
Today we’re getting hep with the youngsters, and offering a podcast in place of the regular blog entry. Technically speaking, it’s somebody else’s podcast – Gary McGraw’s Silver Bullet – but it is a twenty-minute interview with me, much of it discussing blog-related issues. Excerpts will appear in an upcoming issue of IEEE Security &…
-
Don't Be Evil, Yet
Mike at TechDirt writes: As everyone is talking about Google’s (not particularly surprising or interesting) move into offering hosted business apps (basically taking their existing mail and calendar apps, and allowing you to run them for your business), it seems that the story of AOL’s new download software being criticized for secretly installing plenty of…
-
Next-Gen DVD Support Yanked from 32-Bit Vista
Microsoft has announced that the 32-bit version of its forthcoming Windows Vista operating system product won’t support playing commercially-produced next-generation DVDs (i.e., HD-DVD and Blu-Ray discs), according to Dan Warne’s story at APC. 32-bit Vista will be able to access the discs, reading and writing ordinary content, but they won’t be allowed to access DRM-encoded…
-
Great, Now They'll Never Give Us Data
Today’s New York Times has an interesting article by Katie Hafner on AOL’s now-infamous release of customers’ search data. AOL’s goal in releasing the data was to help researchers by giving them realistic data to study. Today’s technologies, such as search engines, have generated huge volumes of information about what people want online and why.…