Security Mechanism Can Enhance Historical Record Keeping

Recently a friend showed me an incredibly creative application of computing technology with all sorts of possible uses. I am a language buff (that means Big Fan) so I immediately grabbed onto historical language issues. Now, this technology project has been around a little while so it isn't completely hot off the press. But I didn't know about it so you may not either.

The reCAPTCHA project. You probably (?) know what a CAPTCHA is: those squiggly tortured hard to read words you have to type in sometimes to gain access to a site, sign up for an online account or post a comment on a blog. If you don't type the word correctly you don't get in. Fortunately you get additional chances with new words. This technology exists because people can usually read the words but computers cannot. This keeps automated spamming out.

Here's the cool upgrade. Have you seen one of those where you have to type in TWO words next to one another? Why two? Isn't one enough? Well, this is what is going on. There are projects underway (which you probably *are* familiar with) to digitize books, newspapers, archival texts. The really old ones, the hand written ones, the faded or slightly crumpled ones - the OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software being used to scan and translate those texts cannot read many of the words.

Fortunately the computer identifies words it doesn't understand. Many of those words are being placed into those CAPTCHA screens. So you get two words: one is a known word, made to look hard to read, and the second is a word that was hard to read to start with (perhaps made more so, just to be safe :). That same unknown word is paired off and given to many many many people in CAPTCHA boxes. If you get the known word right, you get in (at least that is my understanding). If the vast majority of people get the known word right AND provide the unknown word with the same answer, the odds are the unknown word has been correctly identified and it is plugged into its spot in the original scanned text.

I realize the book scanning projects are controversial in some spheres, especially in regard to recent works. What captures (oh ow ow pun) my imagination is the thought of ancient Medieval texts written by monks with all those flourishes being scanned and translated. Ok, they are usually in Latin. Providing a Latin word in a CAPTCHA screen might be a giveaway, but the idea of being able to digitize previously inaccessible texts by harnessing the power of millions of people passing through online security checks is impressive. For now we may have to stick with Victorian English or Elizabethan English or whatever the native language is of the country where a site exists is, but eventually I suspect, computer scientists will find a way to put this to work with languages that are no longer in common use.

Meanwhile, and this might already be in the works, languages like Latin or other special-use languages might be applied to sub-populations of sites where they make sense. To get into a repository of ancient Sanskrit resources you have to type a two word Sanskrit CAPTCHA for example? Ancient texts can be made publicly accessible much faster than they would have been otherwise.

More information about the project: http://www.google.com/recaptcha/learnmore

Internet Voting: Security, Networking, Politics and Some Heat

With social upheavals happening in countries across the middle east and northern Africa, the media and politicians have been talking a lot about democracy and the rights of individuals to freely express themselves politically. Although we are not in a similar situation here in the US - we are not risking civil war or overturning the government - we do have an issue that provokes heated debate and widely divergent perspectives among computer scientists: Internet Voting. The US Constitution guarantees the right to vote for its citizens. Most of us take this right for granted I suspect, whether we act on it or not. It amazes me when I hear how many people do not vote regularly, given that we can do so safely and without worrying about repercussions, but that is another issue.

For the past several years various groups and organizations have been debating, proposing legislation for, and running pilot projects using the Internet to vote. Why? A big motivator is to increase access. American citizens living overseas (civilian, military, government employees) often want to vote but if they have to rely on the postal services of several countries for ballot requests and return, or if they have to travel great distances to get to an approved polling place it can be a significant burden. State and county agencies in this country wonder if they can improve reliability and efficiency while reducing costs by implementing online voting. Given the current fiscal situation in this country that is a huge motivator. The problems of access, reliability and budgetary pressures just scream for consideration of a computing based solution. Maybe it will work, maybe it won't, but if it is going to happen it is going to be computer scientists who make it so (A Captain Picard reference in case you didn't pick up on it).

There are pros and cons and this is where opinions run hot. Let's take just one example: the need to guarantee the security and privacy of such sensitive data if it is sent over the Internet.

Why is a "guarantee" of correctness on the Internet so difficult? As many of you know, the Internet was originally designed by the US Department of Defense for use by a select number of trusted sites for the purpose of guaranteeing communications in the event of a national emergency such as a nuclear attack. Therefore, redundancy of data was the primary concern, not security of data. If Washington DC was attacked, multiple copies of sensitive data would be accessible in repositories across the country. This legacy lives on today, as the Internet has grown into a global network of diverse systems connected with everything from telephone lines to satellites, connecting state of the art computers and mobile devices to 25 year old legacy mainframes. As a result, it seems that we can communicate with almost anyone anywhere at anytime and because of built-in redundancy systems, data almost always gets through - unless someone intentionally interferes. And therein lies the problem. There will always be people who try to steal, or at least read and exploit, data that is not "theirs". Although not unique to electronic voting systems, the vulnerabilities of the Internet bring added attention to this old problem. We do *not* want anyone intercepting electronic ballots, or compromising a voting web site. How good is "good enough" when it comes to accountability and reliability?

How are these issues currently being tackled? I'm going to get technical for two paragraphs in order to provide a flavor of what computer scientists are currently doing in the realm of computer security for sensitive data.

The focus of much data security work is at the application and system levels. Onion routing is an interesting technique that supports anonymity across complex networks. As data is passed from an original source to a final destination it passes through many intermediate nodes (which may reach into the hundreds). Data that is “onion routed” has layers of encryption that are successively “peeled off” at each node, assuming the node in question has the correct cryptographic technique and knowledge to do so. Thus many successive security checks take place and a suspicious event at any node along the path will raise a warning flag. The action then taken is application dependent, and can include halting the process, rerouting the data or other customized response. Two other well known network level security technologies include strategic placement of firewalls and the use of Virtual Private Networks (VPNs). Various methods of authentication, encryption, verification, digital signature and hash functions find their way into this work. How well do state of the art data security efforts protect data and provide an audit trail?

Although the answer to that question invites a range of answers, computer security experts will generally agree that software alone will never be sufficient to detect or prevent tampering. Hardware level security checks are also needed. It is common practice in security intensive systems to include a Tamper Proof Module (TPM). This non-rewriteable chip contains check code to search for tampering. First the boot loader is checked, which then checks the Operating System, which then checks the application(s) for an integrity breach

There are high level issues to be addressed as well. Equally important requirements. An Internet voting system for US voters needs flexibility (to accommodate different state requirements), convenience for the user, training and education of both staff workers and voters. Particularly important is timeliness – the most flexible, friendly, convenient electronic voting system is pointless if the ballot arrives too late to be counted or has to be discarded due to suspicions of fraud.

There are always tricky issues when science and public policy intersect. Computing is particularly complicated because the field is so new, and technology changes so quickly. By the time consensus is reached on a contentious issue, the point may be moot. The technical issues alone for Internet voting are complex, but often come down to one issue: risk assessment. What degree of risk is tolerable in order to achieve a societal right guaranteed by the Constitution? In some cases entrenched opinion comes from holding a philosophical stance about whether or not the Internet can ever be an acceptable medium for any voting, overseas or otherwise.  Proponents argue that it is only a matter of time until Internet voting becomes reality, and also that the subject is a matter of morals, so we must address the problem directly. Critics counter that it is not possible with current technology to implement Internet voting at an acceptable level of security and privacy, so the risks of trying it outweigh the potential benefits.

If we can be successful, the payoffs are tangible: morally, ethically, fiscally. If we don't succeed the risks are serious: from disenfranchisement of citizens to interference with our democratic process in the worst case scenario.

What do we do? Move forward (how?), or sit it out and accept the current situation as good enough for now. What do you think?