DISTINGUISHED LECTURER SERIES

Ronald L. Rivest
Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor of Computer Science
MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

Wednesday, April 4, 2007
Computer Science Building, Rooms 150 & 151
4:00 PM

Faculty Host: Kevin Fu

"Security of Voting Systems"

While running an election sounds simple, it is in fact extremely challenging. Not only are there millions of voters to be authenticated and millions of votes to be carefully collected, counted, and stored, there are now millions of "voting machines" containing millions of lines of code to be evaluated for security vulnerabilities. Moreover, voting systems have a unique requirement: the voter must not be given a "receipt" that would allow them to prove how they voted to someone else---otherwise the voter could be coerced or bribed into voting a certain way. This lack of receipts makes the security of voting system much more challenging than, say, the security of banking systems (where receipts are the norm).

We discuss some of the recent trends and innovations in voting systems, as well as some of the new requirements being placed upon voting systems in the U.S., and describe some promising directions for resolving the conflicts inherent in voting system requirements, including some approaches based on cryptography.

Professor Rivest is the Viterbi Professor of Computer Science in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He is a member of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), a member of the lab's Theory of Computation Group and is a leader of its Cryptography and Information Security Group. He is also a founder of RSA Data Security. (RSA was bought by Security Dynamics; the combined company has been renamed to RSA Security.)

Professor Rivest has research interests in cryptography, computer and network security, voting systems, and algorithms.

Professor Rivest is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences, and is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, the International Association for Cryptographic Research, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is also on the EPIC Advisory Board.

Together with Adi Shamir and Len Adleman, he has been awarded the 2000 IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award and the Secure Computing Lifetime Achievement Award. He has also received, together with Shamir and Adleman, the 2002 ACM Turing Award.

Professor Rivest has received an honorary degree (the "laurea honoris causa") from the University of Rome. He is a Fellow of the World Technology Network and a Finalist for the 2002 World Technology Award for Communications Technology. In 2005, he received the MITX Lifetime Achievement Award.

Professor Rivest is an inventor of the RSA public-key cryptosystem. He has extensive experience in cryptographic design and cryptanalysis, and has published numerous papers in these areas. He has served as a Director of the International Association for Cryptologic Research, the organizing body for the Eurocrypt and Crypto conferences, and as a Director of the Financial Cryptography Association.

He received a B.A. in Mathematics from Yale University in 1969, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1974.

He has also worked extensively in the areas of computer algorithms, machine learning, and VLSI design.

Refreshments at 3:45 PM in the atrium, outside the presentation room.