darpa – Noise

Security Analysis of the MERGE Voting Protocol

Bruce Schneier — Mon, 25 Nov 2024 12:09:05 +0000

Interesting analysis: An Internet Voting System Fatally Flawed in Creative New Ways.

Abstract: The recently published “MERGE” protocol is designed to be used in the prototype CAC-vote system. The voting kiosk and protocol transmit votes over the internet and then transmit voter-verifiable paper ballots through the mail. In the MERGE protocol, the votes transmitted over the internet are used to tabulate the results and determine the winners, but audits and recounts use the paper ballots that arrive in time. The enunciated motivation for the protocol is to allow (electronic) votes from overseas military voters to be included in preliminary results before a (paper) ballot is received from the voter. MERGE contains interesting ideas that are not inherently unsound; but to make the system trustworthy—to apply the MERGE protocol—would require major changes to the laws, practices, and technical and logistical abilities of U.S. election jurisdictions. The gap between theory and practice is large and unbridgeable for the foreseeable future. Promoters of this research project at DARPA, the agency that sponsored the research, should acknowledge that MERGE is internet voting (election results rely on votes transmitted over the internet except in the event of a full hand count) and refrain from claiming that it could be a component of trustworthy elections without sweeping changes to election law and election administration throughout the U.S...

Intel Shows 8 Core 528 Thread Processor with Silicon Photonics

Patrick Kennedy — Tue, 29 Aug 2023 19:58:01 +0000

Intel showed an 8 core CPU with 66 hardware threads per core for 528 threads and it even included silicon photonics networking The post Intel Shows 8 Core 528 Thread Processor with Silicon Photonics appeared first on ServeTheHome.

White House Announces AI Cybersecurity Challenge

Bruce Schneier — Mon, 21 Aug 2023 11:10:59 +0000

At Black Hat last week, the White House announced an AI Cyber Challenge. Gizmodo reports:

The new AI cyber challenge (which is being abbreviated “AIxCC”) will have a number of different phases. Interested would-be competitors can now submit their proposals to the Small Business Innovation Research program for evaluation and, eventually, selected teams will participate in a 2024 “qualifying event.” During that event, the top 20 teams will be invited to a semifinal competition at that year’s DEF CON, another large cybersecurity conference, where the field will be further whittled down...

Detecting “Violations of Social Norms” in Text with AI

Bruce Schneier — Thu, 17 Aug 2023 11:07:58 +0000

Researchers are trying to use AI to detect “social norms violations.” Feels a little sketchy right now, but this is the sort of thing that AIs will get better at. (Like all of these systems, anything but a very low false positive rate makes...

AIs as Computer Hackers

Bruce Schneier — Thu, 02 Feb 2023 11:59:53 +0000

Hacker “Capture the Flag” has been a mainstay at hacker gatherings since the mid-1990s. It’s like the outdoor game, but played on computer networks. Teams of hackers defend their own computers while attacking other teams’. It’s a controlled setting for what computer hackers do in real life: finding and fixing vulnerabilities in their own systems and exploiting them in others’. It’s the software vulnerability lifecycle.

These days, dozens of teams from around the world compete in weekend-long marathon events held all over the world. People train for months. Winning is a big deal. If you’re into this sort of thing, it’s pretty much the most fun you can possibly have on the Internet without committing multiple felonies...