Seminar Type: Invited Speakers
Title: Electronic Voting Systems: Are Your Votes Really Counted?
Start Time: 02/26/2010 - 11:00
End Time: 02/26/2010 - 12:00
Location: ICT 618B
Speaker: Richard A. Kemmerer
Abstract:
iCIS Security Seminars is organized by iCORE Information Security Lab
Electronic voting systems play a critical role in today's democratic societies, as they are responsible for recording and counting the citizens' votes. Unfortunately, there is an alarming number of reports describing the malfunctioning of these systems, suggesting that their quality is not up to the task. Recently, there has been a focus on the security testing of voting systems to determine if they can be compromised in order to control the results of an election. We have participated in two large-scale projects, sponsored by the Secretaries of state of California and Ohio, whose respective goals were to perform the security testing of the electronic voting systems used in those two states. The testing process identified major flaws in all the systems analyzed, and resulted in substantial changes in the voting procedures of both states. In this talk I will describe the testing methodology that we used in testing two real-world electronic voting systems, the findings of our analysis, and the lessons we learned.
Biography:Richard A. Kemmerer is the Computer Science Leadership Professor and a past Department Chair of the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Dr. Kemmerer received the B.S. degree in Mathematics from the Pennsylvania State University in 1966, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1976 and 1979, respectively. His research interests include formal specification and verification of systems, computer system security and reliability, programming and specification language design, and software engineering. He is author of the book Formal Specification and Verification of an Operating System Security Kernel and a co-author of Computersat Risk: Safe Computing in the Information Age, For the Record: Protecting Electronic Health Information, and Realizing the Potential of C4I: Fundamental Challenges.
Dr. Kemmerer is a Fellow of the IEEE Computer Society, a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, and he is the 2007 recipient of the Applied Security Associates Distinguished Practitioner Award. He is a member of the IFIP Working Group 11.3 on Database Security, and a member of the International Association for Cryptologic Research. He is a past Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, and he has served on the editorial boards of the ACM Computing Surveys and IEEE Security and Privacy and on the Board of Governors of the IEEE Computer Society. He currently serves on Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing Academic Advisory Board.