Benlog

For the past few days, and today more so than before, I’ve been in complete disbelief over the detainees bill pushed by President Bush. I can’t believe McCain caved. I can’t believe Democrats are thinking of not standing up to this.
This bill would allow the President to detain someone without proof, torture them, and convict [...]

Well, I had far too much material for my talk today… it’s not easy giving an overview of the works of Benaloh, Chaum, Neff, and other greats in the field! But I tried, and it was fun. I’ve posted the slides, though I never did get to the paper-based crypto systems. (There are 160 pages [...]

During the primaries, voting machines in Maryland broke down. As a result, the manufacturer, Diebold, has been hard at work on a fix. Today, they claim to have fixed the problem, though the Maryland Election Commissioner is cautiously waiting until further tests are conducted ext week before breathing a sigh of relief.
Clearly, this fix [...]

I’m giving a talk at Harvard CRCS, my new home, about the history of secure voting using cryptography. Here’s the full announcement:

CRCS Privacy & Security Lunch Seminar
Speaker: Ben Adida, Harvard CRCS
Date: Wednesday, 27 September
Time: 12-1:30 (lunch provided)
Place: Maxwell Dworkin 119 (one floor above ground level)
Title: A Brief History of Secure Voting
Abstract:
Secret-ballot elections present [...]

Over on Scott Aaronson’s blog, I read an interesting post about voting, and one comment from Bram Cohen regarding a new voting proposal called VoiceVote. A few minutes into reading the proposal, I find the following:

Why VOICE Permits Voters to Retain a Paper Copy of Their Ballot

Giving the voter a paper record of the ballot [...]

Feldman, Halderman, and Felten (from Princeton) have just released an in-depth review of an actual Diebold Touchscreen voting machine. There isn’t anything surprising about their results, but it is a very good thing that it was done with this level of care, detail, and access. I particularly like the “Vote Stealing Control Panel,” which really [...]

My PhD thesis is complete (250 pages of crypto voting goodness). It’s been one crazy month of August!
In the process, I’ve updated my publications and presentations pages to reflect new work:

thesis defense slides,
Scratch & Vote final version,
presentation slides on Privacy at the Media Lab’s Simplicity conference,
How to Shuffle in Public, the [...]