Five-College Speaker Series on Information Assurance
|
David Jefferson |
 |
Electronic voting has become extremely controversial in the United States. Virtually all of the computer scientists who have studied the problem are in agreement that the current generation of electronic voting machines are vulnerable to many kinds of attacks, the most dangerous of which can reverse the results of hundreds of elections simultaneously and yet be totally undetectable, in spite of pre-election testing and post-election auditing. How can this be? On the surface it would appear that a computerized election is a routine distributed computation in which the electronic ballots cast by voters are collected on voting machines, transported to a central server, and the results tabulated by a simple database script. What is so hard about that? Everything. The security, privacy, reliability, verifiability, and legal requirements for electronic voting are profoundly subtle and complex, making it among the richest and most fascinating security problems known. The requirements, for example, are much stronger than those for electronic commerce. The depth of the problem arises from the subtle interplay of security, privacy, and verifiability requirements for elections that have no analog in other applications, and from the vital requirement that elections be secure against insider attacks (by programmers and election officials) in addition to secure against voter misconduct. Biography: Dr. David Jefferson has been conducting research at the intersection of computers, the Internet, and public elections for over a decade. He was recently appointed Chair of the California Secretary of State's Technical Oversight Committee, to provide technical advice on the security and reliability of voting systems. In early 2004 was coauthor with Avi Rubin, Barbara Simons and David Wagner of "A Security Analysis of the Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment (SERVE)" (www.servesecurityreport.org), a strong critique of the Internet voting system proposed by the Department of Defense, which led to cancellation of the $22 million SERVE program. Between 1999 and 2001 he served as chair of the technical committee of the California Secretary of State's Task Force on Internet Voting, whose report was the first major study of the subject ever published. He went on to serve that year on the National Science Foundation-Internet Policy Institute panel on Internet voting, and testified to the National Commission on Federal Election Reform organized by presidents Carter and Ford. He has also consulted with numerous agencies and states on the subject of voting security, including the FEC and the Department of Defense. In 1994, while working at Digital Equipment Corporation, he oversaw development of the California Election Server, the first Web server anywhere to provide voter information on candidates and issues. Since 1995 he has also served on the Board of Directors of the nonprofit, nonpartisan California Voter Foundation (www.calvoter.org). In his day job Dr. Jefferson is a computer scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory where he does research in scalable parallel operating systems and simulation. Before that he conducted research in the laboratories of Digital Equipment Corporation and Compaq. From 1980 to 1994 he was a computer science professor, first at USC and then at UCLA, where he conducted research in parallel computation and simulation. He is well known for the co-invention of the Time Warp method of parallel discrete event simulation. He also published research in operating systems, evolution, and artificial life. | |