Category: voting

security, voting2 Comments

Fort Knox vs. the Barking Dog

benadida

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 security evaluation of their system. I say “more importantly” because there is very little good press to gain from such a test: in fact the DC Board of Elections is already getting a lot of grief, the hah-hah-they-got-haxored articles just write themselves. I think they … Continue reading Fort Knox vs. the Barking Dog

security, voting

Usenix Security, voting and health security

benadida

I’m at Usenix Security 2010 in DC, starting with the EVT/WOTE Workshop on voting where I’ll be presenting an update on Helios, then the HealthSec workshop where I’ll be on a panel discussing my paper with Zak Kohane and Ken Mandl on using a Personally Controlled Health Record for health-information exchange [PDF]. The voting crowd is emerging from a 2-day workshop with election officials on remote voting for military and overseas voters. I’m trying to get a sense of attendees’ impressions from that workshop, but suffice it to say that it seems to have been “exciting.” Ron Rivest compared online … Continue reading Usenix Security, voting and health security

voting

What the Oscars teach us about voting

benadida

This year, the voting process for the Oscars has changed. Rather than indicating a single choice as they have done since 1946, members of the Academy will provide a first choice, a second choice, etc.. potentially ranking all 10 nominees for Best Picture if so desired. Some are speculating that this will affect the results. Some are writing really confusing articles about this change, with very misleading lines like “Getting the most votes is no longer enough.” Here’s the short version of this post: (1) of course ranked-voting is going to affect the Oscar results! and (2) this year, the … Continue reading What the Oscars teach us about voting

crypto, privacy, voting

For deniability, faking data even the owner can’t prove is fake

benadida

I was speaking with a colleague yesterday about Loopt, the location-based social network, the rise of location-based services and the incredible privacy challenges they present. I heard the Loopt folks give a talk a few months ago, and I was generally impressed with the measures they’re taking to protect their users’ data. I particularly enjoyed the problem Loopt faced with respect to abusive spouses: if your spouse is spying on you, it’s not enough to turn off your location services, because then your abusive spouse will know that you’re hiding something. You have to actually be able to lie about … Continue reading For deniability, faking data even the owner can’t prove is fake

crypto, Takoma Park 2009, voting

Takoma Park 2009: the conclusion

benadida

Well, it’s been a few weeks of craziness at home and catching up on other work, but I’ve finally wrapped up the Takoma Park 2009 audit. The final step: letting you, dear reader, run the audit all on your own. You’ll find the complete instructions here on the auditing site. I haven’t tested this on Windows, just Mac OS X, and it should work on Linux/Unix, too. You need Python 2.5 or above, PyCrypto, git, and subversion. You need about 30 minutes of download time, and 1 hour of processing. And then you can check the results you’ve computed against … Continue reading Takoma Park 2009: the conclusion

crypto, Takoma Park 2009, voting

Takoma Park: verifying the shuffle and the unopened ballots

benadida

So the votes have been cast, the uncertified tally has been released, and the confirmation codes have been published for all voters to check. Now, it’s time to make sure that the coded votes, which were shuffled via the Shuffle Tables into the decoded votes in the Results table, were indeed shuffled and decoded correctly. Having trouble remembering which table is which? Here’s a reminder: Now of course we don’t actually see these tables in cleartext, rather what we have right now is: Next, the Scantegrity team used random stock data to seed a random number generator and decide which … Continue reading Takoma Park: verifying the shuffle and the unopened ballots

crypto, Takoma Park 2009, voting

Takoma Park: auditing the auditor

benadida

Rick Carback from the Scantegrity team just pointed out to me that my totals are not quite the same as theirs, and he surmises that I may have read the Instant Runoff rules incorrectly. Specifically, my code considers that ballots that skip a rank, i.e. that go directly to choice #2 and never indicate a choice #1, are “exhausted”, meaning they don’t count anymore. In fact, the rules for Takoma Park state that, in that case, the next candidate choice counts, but if two choices are skipped, then it’s exhausted. He’s absolutely right, and I’ve updated my tally code appropriately, … Continue reading Takoma Park: auditing the auditor