Tag: Security
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Why So Little Attention to Botnets?
Our collective battle against botnets is going badly, according to Ryan Naraine’s recent article in eWeek. What’s that? You didn’t know we were battling botnets? You’re not alone. Though botnets are a major cause of Internet insecurity problems, few netizens know what they are or how they work. In this context, a “bot” is a…
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iPods Shipped with Worm Infection
Apple revealed yesterday that some new iPods – about 1% of the new iPod Videos shipped in the last month or so – were infected with a computer worm that will spread to Windows PCs, according to Brian Krebs at the Washington Post. Apparently a PC used to test the iPods got infected, and the…
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ThreeBallot and Tampering
Let’s continue our discussion (1; 2) of Rivest’s ThreeBallot voting system. I’ve criticized ThreeBallot’s apparent inability to handle write-in votes. More detailed critiques have come from Charlie Strauss (1; 2) and Andrew Appel. Their analysis (especially Charlie’s) is too extensive to repeat here, so I’ll focus on just one of Charlie’s ideas. Recall that ThreeBallot…
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ThreeBallot and Write-Ins
Yesterday I wrote about Ron Rivest’s ThreeBallot voting system. Today I want to start a discussion of problems with the system. (To reiterate: the purpose of this kind of criticism is not to dump on the designer but to advance our collective understanding of voting system design.) Charlie Strauss and Andrew Appel have more thorough…
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ThreeBallot
ThreeBallot is a new voting method from Ron Rivest that is supposed to make elections more secure without compromising voter privacy. It got favorable reviews at first – Michael Shamos even endorsed it at a congressional hearing – but further analysis shows that it has some serious problems. The story of ThreeBallot and its difficulties…
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Dutch E-Voting System Has Problems Similar to Diebold's
A team of Dutch researchers, led by Rop Gonggrijp and Willem-Jan Hengeveld, managed to acquire and analyze a Nedap/Groenendaal e-voting machine used widely in the Netherlands and Germany. They report problems strikingly similar to the ones Ari Feldman, Alex Halderman and I found in the Diebold AccuVote-TS. The N/G machines all seem to be opened…
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Immunizing the Internet
Can computer crime be beneficial? That’s the question asked by a provocative note, “Immunizing the Internet, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Worm,” by an anonymous author in June’s Harvard Law Review. The note argues that some network attacks, though illegal, can be beneficial in the long run by bringing attention…
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E-Voting Testimony
Today at 10:00 AM Eastern I’m testifying at a House Administration Committee hearing on e-voting. Here is the written testimony I submitted.
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Networking Diebold Voting Machines
Reacting to our report about their AccuVote-TS e-voting product, Diebold spokesmen are claiming that the machines are never networked. For example, Diebold’s official written response to our report says that the AccuVote-TS “is never attached to a network” and again that “These touch screen voting stations are standalone units that are never networked together.” This…
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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…