New TerraSwarm Faculty Member Alex Halderman Comments on Electronic Voting Machine Tampering

In the recent elections in India, the press raised concerns about the apparent ease of tampering with electronic voting machines. Hari Prasad, with private sector cyber security firm NetIndia, helped expose the flaws in the machines.

New TerraSwarm faculty member, Alex Halderman (University of Michigan) has been collaborating with Hari Prasad of NetIndia on preventing election hackers.

In an article on SciDev.Net, View on Private Sector: Heading off Election Hackers, Halderman was quoted:

“The problem we faced going into this work was that India didn’t really have an indigenous research community looking into election security issues,” says Halderman. “So it was just absolutely crucial to be able to have people with local knowledge of the technology community, of the political process, and access to the technology.”

“In terms of developing communities within each country that are able to deal with the difficult technical details surrounding conducting elections with computers, I think it’s going to be essential to reach out to the private tech sector and try to forge new partnerships,” says Halderman. "This is because there are “simply not enough” people in academia looking into the problem."

According to Halderman, further academic-private research partnerships are essential to election security in other countries that are experimenting with electronic voting systems.

To read the article in full, please visit:
http://www.scidev.net/global/governance/analysis-blog/view-on-private-sector-election-hackers.html