5,326 research outputs found
The New South Wales iVote System: Security Failures and Verification Flaws in a Live Online Election
In the world's largest-ever deployment of online voting, the iVote Internet
voting system was trusted for the return of 280,000 ballots in the 2015 state
election in New South Wales, Australia. During the election, we performed an
independent security analysis of parts of the live iVote system and uncovered
severe vulnerabilities that could be leveraged to manipulate votes, violate
ballot privacy, and subvert the verification mechanism. These vulnerabilities
do not seem to have been detected by the election authorities before we
disclosed them, despite a pre-election security review and despite the system
having run in a live state election for five days. One vulnerability, the
result of including analytics software from an insecure external server,
exposed some votes to complete compromise of privacy and integrity. At least
one parliamentary seat was decided by a margin much smaller than the number of
votes taken while the system was vulnerable. We also found protocol flaws,
including vote verification that was itself susceptible to manipulation. This
incident underscores the difficulty of conducting secure elections online and
carries lessons for voters, election officials, and the e-voting research
community
Partial replication in the database state machine
This paper investigates the use of partial replication in the Database State Machine approach introduced ear- lier for fully replicated databases. It builds on the or- der and atomicity properties of group communication primitives to achieve strong consistency and proposes two new abstractions: Resilient Atomic Commit and Fast Atomic Broadcast. Even with atomic broadcast, partial replication re- quires a termination protocol such as atomic commit to ensure transaction atomicity. With Resilient Atomic Commit our termination protocol allows the commit of a transaction despite the failure of some of the par- ticipants. Preliminary performance studies suggest that the additional cost of supporting partial replica- tion can be mitigated through the use of Fast Atomic Broadcast
Experimental Economics: Contributions, Recent Developments, and New Challenges
Although economics has long been considered as a non-experimental science, the development of experimental economics and behavioral economics is amazingly rapid and affects most fields of research. This paper first attempts at defining the main contributions of experiments to economics. It also identifies four main trends in the development of experimental research in economics. The third contribution of this paper is to identify the major theoretical and methodological challenges faced by behavioral and experimental economics.behavioral economy ; Experimental economics ; field experiment ; quantitative methods
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