A Discussion of Secure Voting with Michael Alan Specter

Roger Schell: High Assurance in the Twenty-First Century

Roger Schell led the development of the "Orange Book" - the first volume of the US Government's "Rainbow Series" of Computer Security standards - which was one of the inspirations for this podcast's title.  The Orange Book was based on the concept of a reference monitor - an operating system kernel that could be proven secure because it was constructed in a way that supported a proof of its security.  The government's effort to stimulate the emergence of a market for high-assurance systems in the 1980s and 1990s failed, but no subsequent system design principle has proven capable of achieving similar levels of security.  In this episode, Schell discusses the history of high-assurance systems and their place in the 21st-century cybersecurity landscape.

A Discussion of Secure Voting with Michael Alan Specter

Security of voting systems and voting procedures gained national attention during the US election of 2020.  In this episode, we discuss the design and validation of secure voting systems with Michael Alan Specter, a cryptography and election security expert who recently earned his PhD from MIT where he was a member of the Internet Policy Research Initiative and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.  We also discuss Michael's earlier work on technical and policy issues surrounding law enforcement access to cryptographic keys, which led to his co-authorship of the "Keys Under Doormats" report on the subject.

Susan Landau: People Count

In this episode, Lorrie and Bob talk to Susan Landau about her new book, People Count: Contact-Tracing Apps and Public Health,  described by its publisher (MIT Press) as "an introduction to the technology of contact tracing and its usefulness for public health, considering questions of efficacy, equity, and privacy." Susan is Bridge Professor in Cyber Security and Policy at The Fletcher School and the School of Engineering, Department of Computer Science, Tufts University as well as Visiting Professor, Department of Computer Science, University College London. She works at the intersection of cybersecurity, national security, law, and policy. Our conversation with Prof. Landau ranges from the importance of technical communication on matters of risk to interactions and trade-offs among safety, privacy, and other public goods, as well as what it's like to build a career in public policy, security, privacy, and technology.