Neumann (neumann@csl.sri.com)" <neumann@csl.sri.com>, "Edward W. Felten" <felten@CS.Princeton.EDU>, "Gene Spafford (spaf@cerias.purdue.edu)" <spaf@cerias.purdue.edu> Subject: RE: [IP] Re: Attack on CS research by Chronicle for Higher Edu cation I'm certainly in agreement with Dr. Mercuri et al that this is a lousy story. But what bothers me more as a security professional isn't an undergraduate student calling Dr. Felten names, or Dr. Wilson's concern about the "weird arrangement" between Kennesaw State and the State of Georgia, but rather the modest level of skill exhibited by the team at Kennesaw State. As a member of a Virginia legislative commission, I had the opportunity to question Dr. Brit Williams (the founder of the group at Kennesaw) about his group's processes in approving voting machines. Not only do they make no effort at penetration testing, but according to Dr. Williams' testimony, they have no idea how to do such a test! In other words, they had no ability to even look for the sort of attack that Dr. Felten's team so beautifully demonstrated. For an organization that purports to do approvals of software-based voting machines, the lack of this skill is pretty appalling. Also not noted in the article, but critically important is that the Dr. Williams (and, I presume the Kennesaw State team) are responsible not only for reviewing voting machines for Georgia, but also Maryland and Virginia, and perhaps other states that I don't know about. If there's going to be such a concentration of influence in equipment approval, one would hope for a higher degree of competence and professionalism than is displayed in the article. And if the Chronicle is going to publish such an article, I'd think they'd make an effort to truly "see both sides". --Jeremy ------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- You are subscribed as eugen@leitl.org To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: Archives: http://archives.listbox.com/247/ Modify Your Subscription: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=125019&user_secret=59fc1126 Unsubscribe: http://v2.listbox.com/unsubscribe/?id=125019-59fc1126-jnmsh2hs Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had a name of signature.asc]