Crypto stars sound off on e-voting, DRM

SAN FRANCISCO - A panel of distinguished cryptographers at the RSA Conference in San Francisco weighed in on a variety of hot button issues, including electronic voting and rights management for digital media.

Speaking at the annual Cryptographers Panel on Tuesday, Ronald Rivest, co-creator of the RSA encryption algorithm, backed calls for paper ballots to supplement insecure electronic voting technology, while fellow luminaries Paul Kocher and Whitfield Diffie predicted heated battles between privacy advocates and intellectual property owners over the issue of digital rights management.

Rivest cited recent analysis of Diebold Inc. electronic voting systems following a leak of the source code for those systems as evidence that such systems were inadequate to ensure the authenticity of votes cast.

Analysis of the Diebold source code showed that programmers for those companies failed to use accepted authentication methods to secure voting data and cast doubt on the ability of Diebold or other companies to patch the code in time to guarantee the results of approaching elections such as the 2004 U.S. presidential elections, he said.

To ensure the outcome of elections where electronic voting kiosks are used, municipalities should implement voter verifiable technology that would produce a paper copy of each ballot that is cast, Rivest said.

Speaking to an audience of fellow cryptographers and security experts, Rivest cautioned against the "digitizing" of votes. "We know only too well the difficulties of securing complex electronic systems," Rivest said.

Technology companies and municipalities should "go slow," and "keep it simple," relying on paper ballots and audit trails to verify the data collected by electronic voting kiosks, he said.

Speaking after Rivest, Kocher, president and chief scientist of Cryptography Research Inc. noted "failed economies" in a number of areas of technology adoption that are causing pain for corporations and ordinary computer users.

The inability of entertainment companies to control the technology used to play their products -- music and films -- has resulted in a flood of piracy that is hurting those companies, Kocher said. Similarly, the way e-mail is sent and received makes it easy for spammers to flood users' in-boxes with unsolicited messages, he said. The technology community and private sector needs to address those issues if it wants to solve problems like piracy and spam. Failing that, government regulation may be needed to mandate security standards, he said.

Concerns about piracy and terrorism may spell the end of computers and computer networks that are entirely controlled by their owners, said Diffie, chief security officer at Sun Microsystems Inc. The ongoing battle between entertainment companies and their customers over digital duplication of songs and videos and the federal government's desire to tap into data sent over voice over Internet Protocol networks may yield to built-in surveillance features that report on how computers are being used, Diffie said.