Ed Felten provides good advice on this blog about what to do in the wake of Heartbleed, and I’ve read some good technical discussions of the technical problem (see this for a particularly understandable explanation). Update Apr 11: To understand what Heartbleed is all about, see XKCD. Best. Explanation. Ever. In this brief posting, I […]
Wall Street software failure and a relationship to voting
October 24, 2013 by
An article in The Register explains what happened in the Aug 1 2012 Wall Street glitch that cost Knight Capital $440M, resulted in a $12M fine, nearly bankrupted Knight Capital (and forced them to merge with someone else). In short, there were 8 servers that handled trades; 7 of them were correctly upgraded with new […]
Google Glass vuln in QR codes and ballot marking applications
July 19, 2013 by
Reading recently about a vulnerability in Google Glass that can be exploited if a victim takes a picture of a malicious QR code made me think about one of the current trends in absentee balloting. A number of localities in the US are trying out absentee ballot schemes where a voter goes to a website […]
Internet Voting Security: Wishful Thinking Doesn’t Make It True
April 3, 2013 by
[The following is a post written at my invitation by Professor Duncan Buell from the University of South Carolina. Curiously, the poll Professor Buell mentions below is no longer listed in the list of past & present polls on the Courier-Journal site, but is available if you kept the link.] On Thursday, March 21, in […]
How much does a botnet cost, and the impact on internet voting
March 4, 2013 by
A brief article on how much botnets cost to rent (more detail here) shows differing prices depending on whether you want US machines, European machines, etc. Interestingly, the highest prices go to botnets composed of US machines, presumably because the owners of those machines have more purchasing power and hence stealing credentials from those machines […]
