CITP Blog is hosted by Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy, a research center that studies digital technologies in public life. Here you’ll find comment and analysis from the digital frontier, written by the Center’s faculty, students, and friends.
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Last week, CITP’s Tech Policy Clinic, along with Dr. Jennifer King, brought leading interdisciplinary academic researchers together to provide recommendations to the Federal Trade Commission on how it should update…
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The anomaly of cheap complexity
Why are our computer systems so complex and so insecure? For years I’ve been trying to explain my understanding of this question. Here’s one explanation–which happens to be in the…
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Magical thinking about Ballot-Marking-Device contingency plans
The Center for Democracy and Technology recently published a report, “No Simple Answers: A Primer on Ballot Marking Device Security”, by William T. Adler. Overall, it’s well-informed, clearly presents the…
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Toward Trustworthy Machine Learning: An Example in Defending against Adversarial Patch Attacks (2)
By Chong Xiang and Prateek Mittal In our previous post, we discussed adversarial patch attacks and presented our first defense algorithm PatchGuard. The PatchGuard framework (small receptive field + secure…
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New Study Analyzing Political Advertising on Facebook, Google, and TikTok
By Orestis Papakyriakopoulos, Christelle Tessono, Arvind Narayanan, Mihir Kshirsagar With the 2022 midterm elections in the United States fast approaching, political campaigns are poised to spend heavily to influence prospective…
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Toward Trustworthy Machine Learning: An Example in Defending against Adversarial Patch Attacks
By Chong Xiang and Prateek Mittal Thanks to the stunning advancement of Machine Learning (ML) technologies, ML models are increasingly being used in critical societal contexts — such as in…
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Switzerland’s E-voting: The Threat Model
Part 5 of a 5-part series starting here Switzerland commissioned independent expert reviews of the E-voting system built by Swiss Post. One of those experts concluded, “as imperfect as…
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What the Assessments Say About the Swiss E-voting System
(Part 4 of a 5-part series starting here) In 2021 the Swiss government commissioned several in-depth technical studies of the Swiss Post E-voting system, by independent experts from academia and…
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How the Swiss Post E-voting system addresses client-side vulnerabilities
(Part 3 of a 5-part series starting here) In Part 1, I described how Switzerland decided to assess the security and accuracy of its e-voting system. Swiss Post is the…
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How NOT to Assess an E-voting System
by Vanessa Teague, an Australian computer scientist, cryptographer, and security/privacy expert. (Part 2 of a 5-part series starting here) Australian elections are known for the secret ballot and a long…