added some initial handouts
authorChristian Urban <christian dot urban at kcl dot ac dot uk>
Wed, 03 Sep 2014 11:01:14 +0100
changeset 156 3b831b9dc616
parent 155 c70342f08326
child 157 3a8fff66d62b
added some initial handouts
handouts/ho02.tex
handouts/ho03.tex
style.sty
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+\documentclass{article}
+\usepackage{../style}
+
+
+\begin{document}
+
+\section*{Handout 2 (E-Voting)}
+
+In security there are many counter-intuitive phenomena: for
+example I am happy (more or less) to use online banking every
+day, where if something goes wrong, I can potentially loose a
+lot of money, but I am staunchly against using electronic
+voting (lets call it e-voting for short). E-voting is an idea
+that is nowadays often promoted in order to counter low
+turnouts in elections\footnote{In my last local election where
+I was eligible to vote only 48\% of the population have cast
+their ballot. I was, I shamefully admit, one of the
+non-voters.} and generally sounds like a good idea. Right?
+Voting from the comfort of your own home, or on your mobile on
+the go, what could possibly go wrong? Even the UK's head of
+the Electoral Commission, Jenny Watson, argued in 2014 in a
+Guardian article that the UK should have e-voting. Her
+plausible argument is that 76\% of pensioners in the UK vote
+(in a general election?), but only 44\% of the under-25s. For
+which constituency politicians might therefore make more
+favourable (short-term) decisions is clear. So being not yet 
+pensioner, I should be in favour of e-voting, no?
+
+Well, it turns out there are many things that can go wrong
+with e-voting, as I like to argue in this handout. E-voting in
+a ``secure way'' seems to be one of the things in computer
+science that are still very much unsolved. It is not on the 
+scale of Turing's halting problem, which is proved that it can 
+never be solved in general, but it is unsolved with current 
+technology. This is not just my opinion, but 
+from shared by Alex Alderman, who is the world-expert on this
+subject and from whose course on Securing Digital Democracy
+I have most of my information and inspiration. It is also
+a controversial topic in many countries:
+
+\begin{itemize}
+\item The Netherlands between 1997--2006 had electronic voting
+      machines, but ``hacktivists'' had found they can be
+      hacked and also emitted radio signals revealing how you
+      voted.
+
+\item Germany had used them in pilot studies, but in 2007 a
+      law suit has reached the highest court and it rejected
+      electronic voting on the grounds of not being
+      understandable by the general public.
+
+\item UK used optical scan voting systems in a few trail
+      polls, but to my knowledge does not use any e-voting in
+      elections. 
+      
+\item The US used mechanical machines since the 1930s, later
+      punch cards, now DREs and optical scan voting machines.
+
+\item Estonia used since 2007 the Internet for national
+      elections. There were earlier pilot studies for voting
+      via Internet in other countries.
+
+\item India uses e-voting devices since at least 2003. They
+      used ``keep-it-simple'' machines produced by a
+      government owned company.
+
+\item South Africa used software for its tallying in the 1993
+      elections (when Nelson Mandela was elected)
+      and found that the tallying software was
+      rigged, but they were able to tally manually.      
+\end{itemize}
+
+
+The reason that e-voting is such a hard problem is that we
+have requirements about the voting process that conflict with
+each other. The five main requirements are:
+
+\begin{itemize}
+\item {\bf Integrity} 
+  \begin{itemize}
+  \item The outcome of the vote matches with the voters'
+        intend.
+  \item There might be gigantic sums at stake and need to be defended against.
+  \end{itemize}
+\item {\bf Ballot Secrecy}
+  \begin{itemize}
+  \item Nobody can find out how you voted.
+  \item (Stronger) Even if you try, you cannot prove how you voted.
+  \end{itemize}
+\item {\bf Voter Authentication}
+  \begin{itemize}
+  \item Only authorised voters can vote up to the permitted number of votes.
+  \end{itemize}
+\item {\bf Enfranchisement}
+  \begin{itemize}
+  \item Authorised voters should have the opportunity to vote.
+  \end{itemize}
+\item {\bf Availability}
+  \begin{itemize}
+  \item The voting system should accept all authorised votes and produce results in a timely manner.
+  \end{itemize}
+\end{itemize}
+
+To tackle the problem of e-voting, we must first have a look
+into the history of voting and how paper-based ballots 
+evolved. We know for sure that elections were held in Athens
+as early as 600 BC, but might even date to the time of
+Mesopotamia and also in India some kind of ``republics'' might 
+have existed before the Alexander the Great invaded it.
+Have a look at Wikipedia about the history of democracy for 
+more information.
+
+
+
+\subsubsection*{Questions}
+
+Coming back to the question of why I use online banking, but 
+prefer not to e-vote. 
+
+Why do I use e-polling in lectures?
+
+\end{document}
+
+%%% Local Variables: 
+%%% mode: latex
+%%% TeX-master: t
+%%% End: 
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+\documentclass{article}
+\usepackage{../style}
+
+
+\begin{document}
+
+\section*{Handout 3 (Buffer Overflow Attacks)}
+
+By far the most popular attack method on computers are buffer
+overflow attacks. The popularity is unfortunate since we now
+have technology to prevent them. But these kind of attacks are
+still very relevant even today since there are many legacy
+systems out there and also many modern embedded systems
+do not take any precautions to prevent such attacks.
+
+To understand how buffer overflow attacks work we have to have
+a look at how computers work ``under the hood'' (on the
+machine level) and also understand some aspects of the C/C++
+programming language. This might not be everyday fare for
+computer science students, but who said that criminal hackers
+restrict themselves to everyday fare? Not to mention the
+free-riding script-kiddies who use this technology without
+knowing what are the underlying ideas.
+ 
+\end{document}
+
+%%% Local Variables: 
+%%% mode: latex
+%%% TeX-master: t
+%%% End: 
--- /dev/null	Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 1970 +0000
+++ b/style.sty	Wed Sep 03 11:01:14 2014 +0100
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