[Please welcome guest bloggers Eric Smith and Nina Kollars. Eric Smith serves as the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) for a higher ed consortium with membership consisting of Bucknell University, Franklin & Marshall College and Susquehanna University. Nina Kollars is assistant professor of government at Franklin & Marshall college, where her scholarship examines the ways […]
Be wary of one-time pads and other crypto unicorns
March 25, 2015 by
Yesterday, a new messaging app called Zendo got some very favorable coverage from Tech Crunch. At the core of their sales pitch is the fact that they use one-time pads for encryption. With a few strong assumptions, namely that the pads are truly random and are only used once, it’s true that this scheme is “unbreakable” […]
Security flaw in New South Wales puts thousands of online votes at risk
March 22, 2015 by
Update April 26: The technical paper is now available Update Mar. 23 1:30 PM AEDT: Our response to the NSWEC’s response New South Wales, Australia, is holding state elections this month, and they’re offering a new Internet voting system developed by e-voting vendor Scytl and the NSW Electoral Commission. The iVote system, which its creators […]
What should we do about re-identification? A precautionary approach to big data privacy
March 19, 2015 by
Computer science research on re-identification has repeatedly demonstrated that sensitive information can be inferred even from de-identified data in a wide variety of domains. This has posed a vexing problem for practitioners and policy makers. If the absence of “personally identifying information” cannot be relied on for privacy protection, what are the alternatives? Joanna Huey, […]
FREAK Attack: The Chickens of ‘90s Crypto Restriction Come Home to Roost
March 3, 2015 by
Today researchers disclosed a new security flaw in TLS/SSL, the protocol used to secure web connections. The flaw is significant in itself, but it is also a good example of what can go wrong when government asks to build weaknesses into security systems. Back in the early 1990s, it was illegal to export most products […]
