Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University
Joined on August 17, 2016
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Andrew W. Appel is Eugene Higgins Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University, where he has been on the faculty since 1986. He served as Department Chair from 2009-2015. His research is in software verification, computer security, programming languages and compilers, and technology policy. He received his A.B. summa cum laude in physics from Princeton in 1981, and his PhD in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1985. He has been Editor in Chief of ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems and is a Fellow of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery). He has worked on fast N-body algorithms (1980s), Standard ML of New Jersey (1990s), Foundational Proof-Carrying Code (2000s), and the Verified Software Toolchain (2010s).
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It is a well understood scientific fact that Internet voting in public elections is not securable: "the Internet should not be used for the return of marked ballots. ... [N]o known technology guarantees the secrecy, security, and verifiability of a marked ballot transmitted over the Internet." But can legislatures (city councils, county boards, or the U.S. Congress) safely vote by Internet? Perhaps they can. To understand why, let's examine two important differences between legislature votes and public elections. more
State and county election officials across the country employ thousands of computers in election administration, most of them are connected (from time to time) to the internet (or exchange data cartridges with machines that are connected). In my previous post I explained how we must audit elections independently of the computers, so we can trust the results even if the computers are hacked. more
There's been a lot of discussion of whether the November 2016 U.S. election can be hacked. Should the U.S. Government designate all the states' and counties' election computers as "critical cyber infrastructure" and prioritize the "cyberdefense" of these systems? Will it make any difference to activate those buzzwords with less than 3 months until the election? First, let me explain what can and can't be hacked. Election administrators use computers in (at least) three ways... more
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