Yvo Desmedt
<<Invited Talk>>
〇 Date: 2025.6.20 (Fri.)
〇 Speaker: Yvo Desmedt (the University of Texas)
〇 Title: Should Distributed Systems be a Required Course and Where/What Crypto is used in Practical Voting Systems?
〇 Abstract
We introduce a "new" type of attack, which we call Byzantine Discrepancy Attack.
We show how Microsoft Calendar is vulnerable to this attack.
Microsoft Calendar is obviously a "centralized system". Therefore, we
wonder how it suffers from problems one typically finds in distributed systems!
Another practical system we discuss is a cloud based e-voting system. Due to
COVID, several systems have now become virtual. One of these is voting, e.g.,
on promotions, hiring, etc. A voting in early April 2021, using such a system,
resulted in 48 votes from 40 eligible voters! We discuss this and several
other potential problems with cloud based e-voting.
