Closed dsernst closed 7 years ago
Even more appropriate in light of all the talk in news right now about Russian hacking influencing US Presidential Elections.
Could make comparisons to finance systems. As Henry said in "Why hasn't voting changed?":
Money is another technology where it's become much easier. We don't bring cash to the bank each time we get paid. We have checks and ATM. We can manage our bank accounts through a website or on our phones, and when we go to a store we can pay with a plastic card.
If it's possible to manage our life savings through computers, can't we digitize our voting?
Also worth pointing out that the stock markets etc are entirely digital.
It's important to have strong security and backup plans for both our financial systems and democratic systems. These points aren't to minimize that, just to think about it clearly.
Another important impact is for privacy: not good if attackers learn individuals' info that was meant to be private, like voting habits and voter registration.
Very important lesson is the less we store, the less is at risk.
The privacy concerns are related to Path to Decentralization, because as there's less of a dependence on a private DB, there's less private data at risk.
One option to reduce risk is to isolate the backends for voter registration
from voting on legislation
.
Need to distinguish between hacks on the application that compromise the backend infrastructure vs hacks on the user (e.g. phishing, keylogger, compromised email) that are limited to compromising just that user.
Both are important to protect against, of course, but they have different consequences and different defenses.
Defenses listed as sub-points
Defenses listed as sub-points
A number of smart people have brought this up. Need to address this formally.