Security quotes of the week

The possible impact on elections using optical scan ballots is more mixed. One positive use is to detect ballot box stuffing---our methods could help identify whether someone replaced a subset of the legitimate ballots with a set of fraudulent ballots completed by herself. On the other hand, our approach could help an adversary with access to the physical ballots or scans of them to undermine ballot secrecy. Suppose an unscrupulous employer uses a bubble form employment application. That employer could test the markings against ballots from an employee's jurisdiction to locate the employee's ballot.

RSA Security Chairman Art Coviello said that the reason RSA had not disclosed the full extent of the vulnerability because doing so would have revealed to the hackers how to perform further attacks. RSA's customers might question this reasoning; the Lockheed Martin incident suggests that the RSA hackers knew what to do anyway—failing to properly disclose the true nature of the attack served only to mislead RSA's customers about the risks they faced.