Security luminaries chew the fat on e-voting

Our Infosec show diary on Wednesday brought you news of ripped posters, fire and underpants. So it's time we raised the level of discussion for our latest roundup from the annual IT security shindig, which is located in Earls Court for the first time this year. Security rockstars take a bow (Whitfield Diffie far left and Phil …

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Posted Thursday 30th April 2009 14:56 GMT

Chris Simmons

Whitfield Diffie? #

That's Rick Wakeman isn't it?

Posted Thursday 30th April 2009 14:56 GMT

Anonymous Coward

...Buts not the actual Delorean! #

wheres the Flux capacitor????

Posted Thursday 30th April 2009 21:35 GMT

Anonymous Coward

eVoting & eGovernment #

Both suffer from one core problem: finding a reliable way to tie an electronic number to one, and only one physical person without building huge biometric databases or tattooing people.

And that has been solved since a couple of weeks..

Posted Friday 1st May 2009 11:09 GMT

Anonymous Coward

@AC 30Apr09 20:31 #

"And that has been solved since a couple of weeks.."

Yeah right ... tell all

Posted Friday 1st May 2009 11:09 GMT

Christian Berger

democratic eVoting #

Democratic eVoting is as impossible as time travel.

The main problem is that a democratic voting protocoll needs to be completely understandable and verifiable by the large mayority of the population. It's no good if you need a degree in mathematics to be able to understand it, or you need to disassemble code stored in a ROM on a computer. Only if at least 90% of the population can understand the system enought to be able to check for fraud themselves, the system is OK. Till now, no other system than pen and paper can provide that.

Posted Friday 1st May 2009 15:39 GMT

A J Stiles

evoting = impossible #

Christian Berger is spot on; but even among a fully computer-literate population, electronic voting would still be unworkable.

There's still no way to verify that the machines really are running the same program whose Source Code you checked.

Direct-recording mechanical voting machines might be acceptable, if they were close enough to universally comprehensible; but they still don't need any less scrutiny than paper ballots, and are really only workable for first-past-the-post elections. For transferrable votes, nothing beats pencil and paper.

Nothing ensures the integrity of the count like have it being done by representatives of the candidates or the candidates themselves. Nobody trusts anyone else, so they only way they can agree is if they are all telling the truth.

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