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, […]
On compromising app developers to go after their users
March 12, 2015 by
In a recent article by Scahill and Begley, we learned that the CIA is interested in targeting Apple products. I largely agree with the quote from Steve Bellovin, that “spies gonna spy”, so of course they’re interested in targeting the platform that rides in the pockets of many of their intelligence collection targets. What could […]
Threshold signatures for Bitcoin wallets are finally here
March 8, 2015 by
Today we are pleased to release our paper presenting a new ECDSA threshold signature scheme that is particularly well-suited for securing Bitcoin wallets. We teamed up with cryptographer Rosario Gennaro to build this scheme. Threshold signatures can be thought of as “stealth multi-signatures.”
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 […]
