Abstract:

The U.S. Department of Defense had been planning to run an Internet-based voting "experiment" called SERVE (Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment) for the 2004 presidential primaries and general election. In order to evaluate the security of SERVE, a group of computer scientists was asked to review the program. On Jan. 21, 2004 four members of the review panel, including the speaker, produced a report, available at www.servesecurityreport.org, that analyzed the security risks of SERVE and called for SERVE to be shut down. On Feb. 3, 2004, the Department of Defense cancelled SERVE.

In this talk I shall discuss the security problems with Internet voting in general and SERVE in particular. If time permits, I'll also discuss some vulnerabilities of other forms of voting such as paperless touch screen machines.

Speaker:

Barbara Simons is a technology policy consultant. She earned her Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley, and was a computer science researcher at IBM Research, where she worked on compiler optimization, algorithm analysis, and scheduling theory. A former President of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), Simons co-chairs the ACM's US Public Policy Committee (USACM). She served on the NSF panel on Internet Voting, the President's Export Council's Subcommittee on Encryption, and the President's Council on the Year 2000 Conversion. She is on several Boards of Directors, including the U.C. Berkeley Engineering Fund and the Electronic Privacy Information Center, as well as the Advisory Board of the Oxford Internet Institute and the Public Interest Registry's .ORG Advisory Council. She has testified before both the U.S. and the California legislatures. She is a Fellow of ACM and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She received the Alumnus of the Year Award from the Berkeley Computer Science Department, the Norbert Wiener Award from CPSR, the Outstanding Contribution Award from ACM, and the Pioneer Award from EFF.