It is a well understood scientific fact that Internet voting in public elections is not securable: “the Internet should not be used for the return of marked ballots. … [N]o known technology guarantees the secrecy, security, and verifiability of a marked ballot transmitted over the Internet.“ But can legislatures (city councils, county boards, or the […]
Vulnerability reporting is dysfunctional
March 25, 2020 by
By Kevin Lee, Ben Kaiser, Jonathan Mayer, and Arvind Narayanan In January, we released a study showing the ease of SIM swaps at five U.S. prepaid carriers. These attacks—in which an adversary tricks telecoms into moving the victim’s phone number to a new SIM card under the attacker’s control—divert calls and SMS text messages away […]
Building a Bridge with Concrete… Examples
March 23, 2020 by
Thanks to Annette Zimmermann and Arvind Narayanan for their helpful feedback on this post. Algorithmic bias is currently generating a lot of lively public and scholarly debate, especially amongst computer scientists and philosophers. But do these two groups really speak the same language—and if not, how can they start to do so? I noticed at […]
The CheapBit of Fitness Trackers Apps
March 16, 2020 by
Yan Shvartzshnaider (@ynotez) and Madelyn Sanfilippo (@MrsMRS_PhD) Fitness trackers are “[devices] that you can wear that records your daily physical activity, as well as other information about your health, such as your heart rate” [Oxford Dictionary]. The increasing popularity of wearable devices offered by Apple, Google, Nike inadvertently led cheaper versions to flood the market, […]
Ballot-level comparison audits: BMD
March 13, 2020 by
In my previous posts, I’ve been discussing ballot-level comparison audits, a form of risk-limiting audit. Ballots are imprinted with serial numbers (after they leave the voter’s hands); during the audit, a person must find a particular numbered ballot in a batch of a thousand (more or less). With CCOS (central-count optical scan) this works fine: […]
