Security and Privacy in State Voter Registraton Databases

The Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Academies is sponsoring a Study Committee on State Voter Registration Databases (VRDB). I was on a panel discussing Security and Privacy at their second public workshop.

The questions we were asked in advance to address were:

• What principles should guide security decisions? How might these apply to voter registration databases?
• What privacy considerations need to be taken into account?
• What standard, adversarial test could be applied against each state's database? What would you include in such a test?

My thoughts on these topics are summarized in my slides. The presentations by my co-panelists Peter Neumann and Bradley A. Malin are also quite informative.