Benlog

So in the wake of the FireSheep situation, which I described yesterday, the tech world is filled with people talking past each other on one important topic: should we just switch everything over to SSL? As I stated yesterday, I don’t think that’s going to happen anytime soon. I would love to be wrong, because [...]

For years, security folks — myself included — have warned about the risk of personalized web sites such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. being served over plain HTTP, as opposed to the more secure HTTPS, especially given the proliferation of open wifi networks. But warnings from security freaks rarely get people’s attention. A demonstration is [...]

A few days ago, the Wall Street Journal revealed that Facebook apps were leaking user information to ad networks. Today, Facebook proposed a scheme to address this issue. This is good news, but I’m concerned that Facebook’s proposal doesn’t address the underlying issue fully. Facebook could be doing a lot more to protect its users, [...]

So Alex Halderman and team hacked the DC Internet Voting pilot. The voting system they attacked was not particularly well secured, and the type of attack used is a fairly simple web input corruption attack with little novelty. This hack, however, performs a very useful task: educating election officials and the public about what hacks [...]

Over the last few days, Alex Halderman and his team at the University of Michigan hacked an Internet Voting System being field-tested by the DC Board of Elections. First, we need to commend both Alex’s team for their dutiful analysis of this system, and, more importantly, the DC Board of Elections for running an open [...]