Secure voting systems may result from federal grant <br />to computer scientist

New research by Rafael Pass, Cornell assistant professor of computer science, could make Internet business exchanges more secure and lead to more reliable voting systems and online auctions. Pass has received a five-year, $450,000 Faculty Early Career Development award from the National Science Foundation for a project called "Computation and Collaboration in the Era of the Internet."

Currently, Pass explains, encrypted data traveling over a network are only as secure as the initial setup. If two parties try to exchange encrypted data without a trusted setup, a third party could slip in between them and make the person on each end use the intruder's encryption key, thinking it was the key for the other communicator. Similar problems arise with online auctions and voting, where systems have to be confirmed in advance as trustworthy.

Pass proposes to attack the problem through game theory, which deals with how individuals collaborate or compete when none of them has complete information about what the others are doing or planning, to create new kinds of secure communication that also preserve privacy. Along the way he hopes to make cryptography more popular, creating new undergraduate courses in the field, adding cryptography study to beginning computer science courses and introducing it to high school students as a way to interest them in computer science careers.

Pass, a native of Sweden, received the Civilingenjör and Licentiat degrees -- equivalent to the B.S. and M.S. -- at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm in 2000 and 2004, and his Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2006. He joined the Cornell faculty in fall 2006.

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