Tag: Security
-
Where are the California E-Voting Reports?
I wrote Monday about the California Secretary of State’s partial release of report from the state’s e-voting study. Four subteams submitted reports to the Secretary, but as yet only the “red team” and accessibility teams’ reports have been released. The other two sets of reports, from the source code review and documentation review teams, are…
-
California Study: Voting Machines Vulnerable; Worse to Come?
A major study of three e-voting systems, commissioned by the California Secretary of State’s office, reported Friday that all three had multiple serious vulnerabilities. The study examined systems from Diebold, Hart InterCivic, and Sequoia; each system included a touch-screen machine, an optical-scan machine, and the associated backend control and tabulation machine. Each system was studied…
-
Woman Registers Dog to Vote, Demonstrates Ease of Fraud
A woman in Seattle registered her dog to vote, and submitted absentee ballots in three elections on the dog’s behalf, according to an AP story. The woman, Jane Balogh, said she did this to demonstrate how easy it would be for a noncitizen to vote. She put her phone bill in her dog’s name (“Duncan…
-
Botnet Briefing
Yesterday I spoke at a Washington briefing on botnets. The event was hosted by the Senate Science and Technology Caucus, and sponsored by ACM and Microsoft. Along with opening remarks by Senators Pryor and Bennett, there were short briefings by me, Phil Reitinger of Microsoft, and Scott O’Neal of the FBI. (Botnets are coordinated computer…
-
Why So Many False Positives on the No-Fly List?
Yesterday I argued that Walter Murphy’s much-discussed encounter with airport security was probably just a false positive in the no-fly list matching algorithm. Today I want to talk about why false positives (ordinary citizens triggering mistaken “matches” with the list) are so common. First, a preliminary. It’s often argued that the high false positive rate…
-
Walter Murphy Stopped at Airport: Another False Positive
Blogs are buzzing about the story of Walter Murphy, a retired Princeton professor who reported having triggered a no-fly list match on a recent trip. Prof. Murphy suspects this happened because he has given speeches criticizing the Bush Administration. I studied the no-fly list mechanism (and the related watchlist) during my service on the TSA’s…
-
OLPC: Too Much Innovation?
The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project is rightly getting lots of attention in the tech world. The idea – putting serious computing and communication technologies into the hands of kids all over the world – could be transformative, if it works. Recently our security reading group at Princeton studied BitFrost, the security architecture for…
-
How Computers Can Make Voting More Secure
By now there is overwhelming evidence that today’s paperless computer-based voting technologies have such serious security and reliability problems that we should not be using them. Computers can’t do the job by themselves; but what role should they play in voting? It’s tempting to eliminate computers entirely, returning to old-fashioned paper voting, but I think…
-
Manipulating Reputation Systems
BoingBoing points to a nice pair of articles by Annalee Newitz on how people manipulate online reputation systems like eBay’s user ratings, Digg, and so on. There’s a myth floating around that such systems distill an uncannily accurate folk judgment from the votes submitted by millions of ordinary citizens. The wisdom of crowds, and all…
-
Sarasota: Could a Bug Have Lost Votes?
At this point, we still don’t know what caused the high undervote rate in Sarasota’s Congressional election. [Background: 1, 2.] There are two theories. The State-commissioned study released last week argues that for the theory that a badly designed ballot caused many voters to not see that race and therefore not cast a vote. Today…