[ale] OT: Electronic Voting in GA

[Bob Toxen]

On Tue, Oct 28, 2003 at 01:59:32PM -0400, Michael D. Hirsch wrote:
> On Tuesday 28 October 2003 09:36 am, Bjorn Dittmer-Roche wrote:
> > On Tue, 28 Oct 2003, Bob Toxen wrote:
> > > On Sun, Oct 20, 2002 at 11:25:58PM -0600, Joseph A Knapka wrote:
> > > > Public key cryptography allows us to achieve provably
> > > > secure electronic voting, immune from this sort of

> > I should dispell a myth here. Public key cryptography has NOT been proven
> > to be secure through any mathematical process.
It is secure in that it is believed that there is no fast way to factor
large numbers.  Even if such an algorithm were discovered, it would not
affect authentication as much.  If it were, one simply could change algorithms
in a simple upgrade.

It is orders of magnitude more secure than the present Diebold system, in my
professional opinion.

> True--that is one reason why quantum crytography looks so cool.  It is 
> provably secure.  At the moment, it is also damn hard to do, but it's getting 
> easier every year.  Until that time, or someone proved P != NP, we'll have to 
> settle for something that has every appearance of being secure without an 
> exact proof.
The most likely avenues of attack against public key encryption also will
work just fine against quantum crypto.  These include cracking weak
passwords, intercepting text before it is encrypted, etc.

> Michael

Bob Toxen
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