On May 4 2010, Professor Ron Rivest (MIT) will lecture on 'The Security of Voting Systems' at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI). The lecture is part of the CWI/Leiden RISC-seminar series. Ron Rivest is the ‘R' from the RSA cryptosystem and winner of the 2002 ACM Turing Award, which is generally viewed as a `Nobel Prize in Computer Science'.

Date: May 4, 2010
Time: 16.00 – 17.00
Location: Turing room
Drinks and snacks will be served after the lecture. You are all cordially invited.

While running an election sounds simple, it is in fact extremely challenging. Not only are there millions of voters to be authenticated and millions of votes to be carefully collected, counted, and stored, there are now millions of "voting machines" containing millions of lines of code to be evaluated for security vulnerabilities. Moreover, voting systems have a unique requirement: the voter must not be given a "receipt" that would allow them to prove how they voted to someone else---otherwise the voter could be coerced or bribed into voting a certain way. This lack of receipts makes the design of secure voting system much more challenging than, say, the security of banking systems (where receipts are the norm).

We discuss some of the recent trends and innovations in voting systems, as well as some of the new requirements being placed upon voting systems in the U.S., and describe some promising directions for resolving the conflicts inherent in voting system requirements, including some approaches based on cryptography. We also describe the use of the 'Scantegrity II' end-to-end voting system, developed by David Chaum and researchers from MIT, GWU, UMBC, Ottawa, and Waterloo, in last November's election in the city of Takoma Park, Maryland.

Professor Rivest is the Viterbi Professor of Computer Science in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He is a member of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), a member of the lab's Theory of Computation Group and is a leader of its Cryptography and Information Security Group. Professor Rivest has research interests in cryptography, computer and network security, algorithms, and voting systems.

Professor Rivest is a co-inventor of the RSA public-key cryptosystem. He has extensive experience in cryptographic design and cryptanalysis, and is a founder of RSA Data Security and of Verisign. With Adi Shamir and Len Adleman, he has been awarded the 2002 ACM Turing Award and the 2009 NEC C&C Prize.

Webpage: http://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/

The lecture is organised by Ronald Cramer (CWI and Mathematical Institute, Leiden University), leader of the research group Cryptology at CWI.