March 19, 2024

Archives for July 2022

Magical thinking about Ballot-Marking-Device contingency plans

The Center for Democracy and Technology recently published a report, “No Simple Answers: A Primer on Ballot Marking Device Security”, by William T. Adler.   Overall, it’s well-informed, clearly presents the problems as of 2022, and it’s definitely worth reading.  After explaining the issues and controversies, the report presents recommendations, most of which make a lot […]

Toward Trustworthy Machine Learning: An Example in Defending against Adversarial Patch Attacks (2)

By Chong Xiang and Prateek Mittal In our previous post, we discussed adversarial patch attacks and presented our first defense algorithm PatchGuard. The PatchGuard framework (small receptive field + secure aggregation) has become the most popular defense strategy over the past year, subsuming a long list of defense instances (Clipped BagNet, De-randomized Smoothing, BagCert, Randomized […]

New Study Analyzing Political Advertising on Facebook, Google, and TikTok

By Orestis Papakyriakopoulos, Christelle Tessono, Arvind Narayanan, Mihir Kshirsagar With the 2022 midterm elections in the United States fast approaching, political campaigns are poised to spend heavily to influence prospective voters through digital advertising. Online platforms such as Facebook, Google, and TikTok will play an important role in distributing that content. But our new study […]

Toward Trustworthy Machine Learning: An Example in Defending against Adversarial Patch Attacks

By Chong Xiang and Prateek Mittal Thanks to the stunning advancement of Machine Learning (ML) technologies, ML models are increasingly being used in critical societal contexts — such as in the courtroom, where judges look to ML models to determine whether a defendant is a flight risk, and in autonomous driving,  where driverless vehicles are […]

Switzerland’s E-voting: The Threat Model

Part 5 of a 5-part series starting here Switzerland commissioned independent expert reviews of the E-voting system built by Swiss Post.   One of those experts concluded, “as imperfect as the current system might be when judged against a nonexistent ideal, the current system generally appears to achieve its stated goals, under the corresponding assumptions […]