Yesterday was the first time a truly voter verifiable voting system was used in any binding government election, thanks in part to work being carried out at UMBC’s Cyber Defense Lab under the direction of Alan Sherman.

Takoma Park, MD used the Scantegrity system for its municipal election after testing it in a mock election last April. Technology Review has a story, First Test for Election Cryptography, that quotes Anne Sergeant, the chair of the Takoma Park board of elections

“Before trying Scantegrity in an official election, the city held a mock vote in April to work out kinks in the system. In that test, she says, about 30 percent of participants went home and used the system to verify their votes. Sergeant says that Scantegrity representatives talked extensively with voters and election officials after the April test and have improved their system accordingly. “I hope we can provide an experience where people walk away and say, ‘That was awesome,’” she says. “It’s a goal to which we aspire.”

The Scantegrity system was created by a group of universities, including UMBC. A voter uses a paper ballot marked with invisible ink, which is exposed with a special marker. That marker reveals a code, which the voter can then use to check online whether their vote was tabulated correctly.

Ben Adida has been auditing the election and documenting the process on his blog.

See also E-voting system lets voters verify their ballots are counted.

AISL CO-PI Elisa Bertino has been elected chair of the ACM Special Interest Group on Security, Audit and Control (SIGSAC) for a one year term bebinning.

She is professor at the Department of Computer Science, Purdue University and Research Director of CERIAS. Her main research interests cover many areas in the fields of information security and database systems. Her research combines both theoretical and practical aspects, addressing as well applications on a number of domains, such as medicine and humanities.

SIGSAC’s mission is to develop the information security profession by sponsoring high quality research conferences and workshops. SIGSAC conferences addresses all aspects of information and system security, encompassing security technologies, secure systems, security applications and security policies. Security technologies include access control, assurance, authentication, cryptography, intrusion detection, penetration techniques, risk analysis and secure protocols. Security systems include security in operating systems, database systems, networks and distributed systems and middleware. Representative security applications areas are information systems, workflow systems, electronic commerce, electronic cash, copyright and intellectual property protection, telecommunications systems and healthcare. Security policies encompass confidentiality, integrity, availability, privacy, and survivability policies, including trade-off and conflicts amongst these.

Congratulations to AISL CO-PI Ravi Sandhu, who was appointed Editor in Chief of IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC). His term will start on January 1, 2010. TDSC is a quarterly journal for archival research results on the foundations, methodologies, and mechanisms supporting the design of systems and networks that are dependable and secure without compromising performance.

Ravi Sandhu is Founding Executive Director of the Institute for Cyber Security at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where he holds the Lutcher Brown Endowed Chair in Cyber Security and courtesy appointments in Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering and Information Systems. He previously served on the Information Security faculty at George Mason University (1989-2007) and the Computer Science faculty at Ohio State University (1982-1989). Ravi received B.Tech. and M.Tech. degrees in EE from IIT Bombay and Delhi respectively, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in CS from Rutgers University. He is a Fellow of ACM (2001), IEEE (2002), and AAAS (2008), recipient of the IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award (2004), the ACM SIGSAC Outstanding Contribution Award (2008), and two Best Paper awards from NIST/NSA (1992, 1998).

Bhavani Thuraisingham will give a keynote talk this week at the The Third IEEE International Conference on Secure Software Integration and Reliability Improvement (SSIRI09) in Shanghai, China. Her talk on Security Engineering: Developments and Directions will discuss the developments in security engineering from requirements, to policy to model to design to verification to testing as well as developing CONOPS and conducting certification and accreditation. She will also cover system evaluation, usability and metrics related issues enumerate changes that have to be made to security engineering to support the next generation of secure systems for mission critical applications. Her presentation slides are available online.

AISL CO-PI Lada Adamic gave a keynote talk at Hypertext’09, the 20th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia, held June 29 – July 1 in Trento. Lada’s talk, The Social Hyperlink, covered the influence of social networks on the World Wide Web, peer-to-peer systems, and virtual worlds. You can get her slides here.

KDAF-TV in Dallas/Fort Worth did a story on privacy and social media featuring an interview with Murat Kantarcioglu.

“Online Social Networks are redefining privacy and personal security, but how much of your personal life have you already given up? A professor at UT Dallas says chances are you’ve given up more than you know.

We were happy to see recent UMBC alumnus Akshay Java’s work on Twitter is mentioned in an article, Utility in the Jumble of Tweets, in yesterday’s New York Times.

“Some developers are creating tools to help companies keep an eye on the buzz. Akshay Java, a scientist at Microsoft, is trying to figure out a way to identify which experts are most influential on given topics by automatically analyzing the content of their tweets and who is in their Twitter network. Companies like Microsoft could use that information to figure out which twitterers they should contact to create buzz about a new product.”