A panel of distinguished cryptographers at the RSA Conference in San Francisco weighed in on a variety of hot button issues, including electronic voting and rights management for digital media.
Speaking at the annual Cryptographers Panel on Tuesday, Ronald Rivest, co-creator of the RSA encryption algorithm, backed calls for paper ballots to supplement insecure electronic voting technology, while fellow luminaries Paul Kocher and Whitfield Diffie predicted heated battles between privacy advocates and intellectual property owners over the issue of digital rights management.
Rivest cited recent analysis of Diebold Inc. electronic voting systems following a leak of the source code for those systems as evidence that such systems were inadequate to ensure the authenticity of votes cast.
Analysis of the Diebold source code showed that programmers for those companies failed to use accepted authentication methods to secure voting data and cast doubt on the ability of Diebold or other companies to patch the code in time to guarantee the results of approaching elections such as the 2004 U.S. presidential elections, he said.
To ensure the outcome of elections where electronic voting kiosks are used, municipalities should implement voter verifiable technology that would produce a paper copy of each ballot that is cast, Rivest said.
View: Complete article at InfoWorld
News source: InfoWorld
