Bits and Bytes

Estonian Voting. A new group, Estonia Voting, claims that there are major cybersecurity gaps in the Estonian electronic voting system: “As international experts on e-voting security, we decided to perform an independent evaluation of the system, based on election observation, code review, and laboratory testing. What we found alarmed us. There were staggering gaps in procedural and operational security, and the architecture of the system leaves it open to cyberattacks from foreign powers, such as Russia.” The Estonian government says that the research is all wet. Russia tightens controls of bloggers. “Russia has taken another major step toward restricting its once freewheeling Internet, as President Vladimir V. Putin quietly signed a new law requiring popular online voices to register with the government, a measure that lawyers, Internet pioneers and political activists said Tuesday would give the government a much wider ability to track who said what online.” Congress may prohibit NSA from “weakening” encryption. “US legislators concerned about weaknesses in a major surveillance reform bill intend to insert an amendment barring the National Security Agency from weakening the encryption that many people rely on to keep their information secure online, or exploiting any internet security vulnerabilities it discovers.” [I’m not sure how this will work as it assumes a standard against which the idea of “weakening” can be measured.] Dark Market – Successor to Silk Road. “At a Toronto Bitcoin hackathon earlier this month, the group took home the $20,000 first prize with a proof-of-concept for a new online marketplace known as DarkMarket, a fully peer-to-peer system with no central authority for the feds to attack. If DarkMarket’s distributed architecture works, law enforcement would be forced to go after every contraband buyer and seller one by one, a notion that could signal a new round in the cat-and-mouse game of illicit online sales.” [Fascinating … and possibly devastating.]