Browsing by Author "Bannet, Jonathan"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Hack-a-Vote: Demonstrating Security Issues with Electronic Voting Systems
    (2003-11-21) Bannet, Jonathan; Price, David W.; Rudys, Algis; Singer, Justin; Wallach, Dan S.
    A representative democracy depends on a universally trusted voting system for the election of representatives; voters need to believe that their votes count, and all parties need to be convinced that the winner and loser of the election were declared legitimately. Direct recording electronic (DRE)voting systems are increasingly being deployed to fill this role. Unfortunately, doubts have been raised as to the trustworthiness of these systems. This article presents a research voting system and associated class project which was used to demonstrate several classes of bugs that might occur in such a voting system unbeknownst to voters, with the difficulty of detecting these bugs through auditing. The intent of this project is to justify the mistrust sometimes placed in DRE voting systems that lack a voter-verifiable audit trail.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Soft boundaries for statically enforceable protection domains
    (2005) Bannet, Jonathan; Wallach, Dan S.
    As safe languages, such as Java, find themselves leveraged to run larger, multi-task applications, many of the security concerns historically solved by hardware enforced protection domains are again sneaking their way into code. Previous schemes to enforce protection domains within the Java language have accepted run-time overhead and severe limitations on sharing semantics as a reasonable cost to achieve security. This thesis proposes soft boundaries to attain the benefits of separation without additional run-time overhead and without compromising the Java semantics. Soft boundaries use static analysis to assist the programmer in isolating components, protecting both a program's data and its control flow. Soft boundaries can be deployed either independently or in conjunction with previous separation schemes to further bolster separation.