December 22, 2024

How the Swiss Post E-voting system addresses client-side vulnerabilities

(Part 3 of a 5-part series starting here) In Part 1, I described how Switzerland decided to assess the security and accuracy of its e-voting system.  Swiss Post is the “vendor” developing the system, the Swiss cantons are the “customer” deploying it in their elections, and the Swiss Parliament and Federal Chancellery are the “regulators,”  […]

How NOT to Assess an E-voting System

by Vanessa Teague, an Australian computer scientist, cryptographer, and security/privacy expert. (Part 2 of a 5-part series starting here) Australian elections are known for the secret ballot and a long history of being peaceful, transparent and well run. So it may surprise you to learn that the Australian state of New South Wales (NSW) is […]

How to Assess an E-voting System

Part 1 of a 5-part series If I can shop and bank online, why can’t I vote online?   David Jefferson explained in 2011 why internet voting is so difficult to make secure,  I summarized again in 2021 why internet voting is still inherently insecure, and many other experts have explained it too.  Still, several […]

Most top websites are not following best practices in their password policies

By Kevin Lee, Sten Sjöberg, and Arvind Narayanan Compromised passwords have consistently been the number one cause of data breaches by far, yet passwords remain the most common means of authentication on the web. To help, the information security research community has established best practices for helping users create stronger passwords. These include: Block weak […]

Dcentral vs. Consensus: Are institutions “frens” or enemies of crypto?

As a part of an ethnographic study on blockchain organizations, I recently attended two major conferences – Dcentral Con and Consensus – held back-to-back in Austin, Texas during a blistering heatwave. My collaborator, Johannes Lenhard, and I had conducted a handful of interviews with angel investors, founders, and venture capitalists, but we’d yet to conduct […]