J. Alex Halderman

There are others that do it. While we're on the topic, I will say that Caddy has independently and repeatedly been cited as the gold standard of ACME clients, "the best client experience," and "we hope to see other servers follow Caddy's lead." [0] [1] [and others I don't have links to currently]. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OE5UhQGg_Fo [1]: https://jhalderm.com/pub/papers/letsencrypt-ccs19.pdf

I wish I had immediately thought of my two-time coauthor J. Alex Halderman (https://jhalderm.com/) as a present-day computer scientist who gets cited by first initial and middle name. And also the famous albeit fictitious J. Random Hacker! (Perhaps inspired by the inaugural FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.)

It's worth reading the paper: https://jhalderm.com/pub/papers/letsencrypt-ccs19.pdf I don't think this is just about having money and funding, it's a very careful and tactical approach. Agree it would be nice if we find and capitalize on opportunities like this, but (to me) it would be hard to run an email provider with the operational goals they list: - Minimal logic - Minimal data - Full automation - Functional isolation - Operational isolation - Continuous availability

There is a fantastic paper on how these proxies often lower security: "The Security Impact of HTTPS Interception" [1]. The paper also provides some interesting ways of detecting this type of proxy on the server (and client too - although a client should know if they have custom trusted certs). mitm.watch has implemented the details of the paper. [1] https://jhalderm.com/pub/papers/interception-ndss17.pdf [2] https://mitm.watch/

Halderman is a computer security professor at UofM: https://jhalderm.com/

There was an interesting talk [0] and paper [1] presented at some security conferences about crawling the DHT for different purposes. It's been a while, but I remember these to be a great read. [0] https://www.defcon.org/images/defcon-18/dc-18-presentations/Wolchok/DE… [1] https://jhalderm.com/pub/papers/dht-woot10.pdf

If you haven't already, you should read these two papers on this topic by Professor Alex J. Halderman of University of Michigan. Security Analysis of India’s Electronic Voting Machines -https://jhalderm.com/pub/papers/evm-ccs10.pdf Attacking the Washington, D.C. Internet Voting System-https://jhalderm.com/pub/papers/dcvoting-fc12.pdf source: https://jhalderm.com

From your description I am missing one important idea that you should communicate clearly: you, we and nobody else currently wants to have online voting - what we want to have, are tools that enable transparency and gathering of information, also discussions and preparation of decisions, but the final decision is something you do NOT want to do online. See this talk from 31C3: http://media.ccc.de/browse/congress/2014/31c3_-_6344_-_en_-_saal_1_-_2… If you still believe that online voting is doable and a great thing, please contact Mr. Halderman and talk to him or read about his work: https://jhalderm.com/ Also I recommend to do some research what the german pirate party is using regarding democracy tools - they have a lot of experience not only coding such tools, but also with real life usage. A good start could be https://liqd.net/en/ here you can find the adhocracy platform: https://github.com/liqd/adhocracy/ which seems to be in a much better developed state than what I see on democracyOS - but maybe there are many things not visible right now to me, so sorry for this criticism. Adhocracy is currently in use by several organizations and they have lots of real life experience, especially with user adaption. An interesting application of adhocracy is https://offenekommune.de/ Another interesting tool for organizing (really big) meetings: http://openslides.org/en/ and of course…

Ballot marking devices are riskier than hand-marked ballots. A forthcoming study found that few people check what the machines print out, and even fewer actually report discrepancies to poll workers. https://jhalderm.com/pub/papers/bmd-verifiability-sp20.pdf

They also will often install their own trusted root certificate and then MITM all HTTP/HTTPS connections. Often, this MITM will significantly reduce the cryptographic security of the connection over the public internet [1]. [1] https://jhalderm.com/pub/papers/interception-ndss17.pdf

For reference The code is here: https://github.com/caddyserver/caddy/blob/master/caddyhttp/httpserver/… The paper: https://jhalderm.com/pub/papers/interception-ndss17.pdf

There's an updated version of the paper that was published today, so here's an even better link: https://jhalderm.com/pub/papers/weakdh-cacm19.pdf Source: I'm an author.

https://jhalderm.com/pub/papers/ipmi-woot13.pdf suggests one (fairly visible) way: > Another common feature is virtual USB disk media, which can be used to infiltrate or exfiltrate files or to provide new boot media. The combination of these capabilities and remote power cycling would allow an attacker to seize control of most common server configurations. For instance, they could restart the system and boot from a virtual live CD, then directly copy or modify data on the host’s storage devices If the IPMI has write access to disc and/or main memory, you can do it more directly - drop a new /bin/login on the disc, or patch it in memory (similar to the LoJax attack: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18090651)

Not to mention voting online - yes, Estonia does this, and it's as insecure as you'd imagine [0]. [0]: [pdf] https://jhalderm.com/pub/papers/ivoting-ccs14.pdf

The authors of the original paper [1] identified that the set of client cipher suites advertised by each browser can be used to fingerprint and identify a browser. Caddy records the cipher suite advertised by the client during the TLS handshake and then later examines the client's user agent. Using the fingerprinting techniques mentioned in the paper, Caddy then determines whether or not the advertised user-agent is compatible with the user-agent that it inferred through the client cipher suites. TLS interception proxies establish their own TLS connection to the server. Depending on what underlying TLS library the proxy uses, it also has its own unique fingerprint. When the TLS proxy forwards the user's request, Caddy detects the mismatch and flags it as a MITM. [1] https://jhalderm.com/pub/papers/interception-ndss17.pdf

We recently published a paper on this exact issue and quantify the degree to which AV / corporate middlebox systems degrade the security of HTTPS connections. The tl;dr is that we find an alarming amount of MITM on the public internet (5-10%), mostly due to AV/middleboxes, and they almost always degrade the security of the connection. *https://jhalderm.com/pub/papers/interception-ndss17.pdf

It has its own problems: https://jhalderm.com/pub/papers/ivoting-ccs14.pdf

The Estonian system is incredibly insecure. Not only because of legal and procedural errors, but also because of technical issues. Some references: https://jhalderm.com/pub/papers/ivoting-ccs14.pdf ( Lookup the ID-card part. ) http://www.wassenaar.org/ ( Crypto is defined as a "dual use" weapon. ) The worst aspect of the estonian ID-card is simply the fact that your private key is not private, and stored in the card itself. You as a user, can not revoke or resign it. At the same time however, it holds full legal status and dominion over your identity.

Link to the actual report: https://estoniaevoting.org/ Peer reviewed paper: https://jhalderm.com/pub/papers/ivoting-ccs14.pdf

The original paper is here: https://jhalderm.com/pub/papers/traffic-woot14.pdf

I'm always amazed the BitTorrent DHT infrastructure has been working so well for so long: Real-World Sybil Attacks in BitTorrent Mainline DHT: http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/lxwang/publications/security.pdf Crawling BitTorrent DHTs for Fun and Profit: https://jhalderm.com/pub/papers/dht-woot10.pdf Profiling a Million User DHT: http://www.michaelpiatek.com/papers/dht_imc_falkner.pdf Lying To The Neighbours - Nasty effects with tracker-less BitTorrent: http://events.ccc.de/congress/2010/Fahrplan/events/4210.en.html

Speaking of resilience, I wrote a paper [1] 3 years ago about how to rebuild torrent sites (like TPB) within a couple hours of a denial of service (legal or otherwise) using the Vuze client's DHT. There was some similar concurrent work [2] on the Mainline DHT by Aaron Grunthal. I'd be interested to find out whether anyone has applied it for that application. [1] "Crawling BitTorrent DHTs for Fun and Profit." https://jhalderm.com/pub/papers/dht-woot10.pdf [2] "Efficient Indexing of the BitTorret Distributed Hash Table." http://arxiv.org/pdf/1009.3681v1.pdf

Disk encryption wouldn't defeat an attacker that had access to your keys (either by compromising a running system or through a cold-boot attack[1]). If the keys are available, the contents of the disk are accessible. Overwriting deleted files would still have value in these cases. [1] https://jhalderm.com/pub/papers/coldboot-sec08.pdf

Better to link to the original news article - http://gizmodo.com/5889838/hacked-dc-school-board-e+voting-elects-bend… - or even the actual paper (from Feb. 2012) at https://jhalderm.com/pub/papers/dcvoting-fc12.pdf .

The original paper: https://jhalderm.com/pub/papers/dcvoting-fc12.pdf

> I don't think that's the correct interpretation of this document. A better title would be "Most TLS Proxies Considered Harmful", not TLS interception as a whole. This is the usual reaction to this I see everywhere. It doesn't match with reality. Read the complete paper by Halderman et al [1]. It says pretty clearly that all existing products lower the security in one way or another: "Our grading scale focuses on the security of the TLS handshake and does not account for the additional HTTPS validation checks present in many browsers, such as HSTS, HPKP, OneCRL/CRLSets, certificate transparency validation, and OCSP must-staple. None of the products we tested supported these features." TLS Interception that doesn't degrade security is a myth that exists only in some parallel world fantasy. It's also not very surprising. Browser vendors have extremely qualified security teams that are involved in many ways in the development of stronger TLS protections. Nothing like that can be said about any of the vendors of interception products. [1] https://jhalderm.com/pub/papers/interception-ndss17.pdf

There was a paper posted on HN a few weeks back by some pretty serious security researchers on the security risks of SSL MITM boxes. https://jhalderm.com/pub/papers/interception-ndss17.pdf How do you fix this when you're naught but a humble employee? Well, a friend of mine worked at a fairly large tech company where a salesguy for these boxes had convinced the CTO they had to have them. Every tech-person "on the floor" hated the idea, so before the boxes were installed they conspired on their free time to write some scripts that ran lots of legitimate HTTPS traffic, effectively DDOSing the boxes and bringing the company's internet to a crawl for the day, like Google would take ten seconds to open. Then obviously everyone (including the non-tech people) started calling the IT helpdesk complaining that the internet was broken. MITM box salesguy then had to come up with a revised solution, costing 20x more than his first offer, and that was the end of that. If you already are suffering under MITM boxes, a similar strategy with a slow ramp-up in traffic might work.

Here's a 2012 paper from a team at the University of Michigan detailing a "mock election" gone wrong: Title. Attacking the Washington, D.C. Internet Voting System Abstract. In 2010, Washington, D.C. developed an Internet voting pilot project that was intended to allow overseas absentee voters to cast their ballots using a website. Prior to deploying the system in the general election, the District held a unique public trial: a mock election during which anyone was invited to test the system or attempt to compromise its security. This paper describes our experience participating in this trial. Within 48 hours of the system going live, we had gained near-complete control of the election server. We successfully changed every vote and revealed almost every secret ballot. Election officials did not detect our intrusion for nearly two business days—and might have remained unaware for far longer had we not deliberately left a prominent clue. This case study—the first (to our knowledge) to analyze the security of a government Internet voting system from the perspective of an attacker in a realistic pre-election deployment—attempts to illuminate the practical challenges of securing online voting as practiced today by a growing number of jurisdictions. https://jhalderm.com/pub/papers/dcvoting-fc12.pdf

Sure, apt is secure. However, I don't think that's what's being discussed. If I remember correctly, the researchers were complaining about how Linux ISOs were downloaded, not packages. (The writer of the rebuttal seems to be confusing these, which is, again, concerning.) To quote their paper: > Despite procedural safeguards, an attacker who strikes early enough can introduce malicious code into the counting server by using a chain of infections that parallels the configuration process. During pre-election setup, workers use a development machine, which is configured before setup begins, to burn Debian Linux installation ISOs to DVDs. These DVDs are later used to configure all election servers. If the machine used to burn them is compromised—say, by a dishonest insider, an APT-style attack on the development facility, or a supply-chain attack—the attacker can leverage this access to compromise election results. > We experimented with a form of this attack to successfully change results in our mock election setup. We first created a modified Debian ISO containing vote-stealing malware intended to execute on the counting server. The tainted ISO is repackaged with padding to ensure that it is identical in size to the original. In a real attack, this malicious ISO could be delivered by malware running on the DVD burning computer, by poisoning the mirror it is retrieved from, or by a network-based man-in-the-middle. > During the setup process, election workers check the SHA-256…

Electronic voting machines used in Indian elections are custom built for the purpose, and cost about $100. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_voting_machines All it has is N buttons, accumulators to store presses of each button in non-volatile memory, and a seven-segment LED display to indicate status (ready-to-vote, vote cast, etc.). Vote counting is done offline by connecting to a controller. No wifi or any other remote-access capability. All that really needs to be done to create a paper trail is to add a printer. Not implying that they're completely secure, but any breach at least needs physical access to the box. And physical security of the machines is on the same level as those provided for traditional ballot boxes. Edit 1: The balloting unit does not even have a 7-segment display - just individual LEDs next to their buttons to provide feedback that the button has been pressed. Edit 2: More details on the internals of the EVM: https://jhalderm.com/pub/papers/evm-ccs10.pdf