Benlog

MIT Tech Review asked me for a general comment on web authentication for their article covering new technology by Delfigo. There wasn’t enough time to look in depth at Delfigo’s technology, so my comments were about multi-factor authentication in general, and whether the additional factors are easily phishable. In other words, it’s interesting if authentication [...]

An election just wrapped up a few hours hours ago [public radio, le soir, RTL info]. The encrypted votes are stored in a redundant database, tied to each voter’s identifier, signed by the voting system, and available to all election participants for auditing. Each voter has a receipt of their encrypted vote they can compare [...]

About 2 years ago, I tried to come up with a way to make OpenID and similarly single-sign-on systems less phishing-prone. That turned into BeamAuth (note to self: must publish the source code! Argg, so little time.) Minutes before I presented BeamAuth at CCS, Adam and Collin cornered me and found a subtle but significant [...]

Richard Drury recently completed his documentary “Challenges for Democracy”, which covers a number of voting issues. His work is available for sale, so if you support this kind of in-depth reporting, please go buy his DVD!
Richard has graciously agreed to release my segment on Open-Audit Elections under a Creative Commons license. Here it is, and [...]

T’is election season, so the press is covering voting. Cyrus again, this time on Salon, and with a fantastic article, and not just because it mentions Helios.

The Economist covers voting with cryptography, including some of my work. Good to see folks like the Economist paying attention… although the article misses the big point.
Voting with cryptography is not about making your vote more secret. It’s about making your vote more verifiable. For those who advocate traditional paper ballots, the point is that [...]

Scratch & Vote is in the press thanks to Peter Weiss of Science News, who gives a very good overview of election technology issues. I’ve also posted the slides and latest paper for this work, which is joint with Ronald Rivest.

MIT Technology Review just published a description of Scratch & Vote, the simple paper-based cryptographic voting scheme that Ron Rivest and I devised. It’s great to see growing interest in cryptographic voting from the scientific press, especially since the debate has focused far too much on “paper or no paper,” when the real question should [...]