The UMBC Cyber Defense Lab presents

More holes than cheese:
Vulnerabilities of the e-voting system
used in the 2022 French presidential election

Enka Blanchard

CNRS, Laboratory of Industrial and Human Automation, Mechanics and Computer Science, Université Polytechnique Hauts-de-France, and CNRS Center for Internet and Society

12–1 pm ET Friday, 13 May 2022 via WebEx

(joint work with Antoine Gallais, Emmanuel Leblond, Djohar Sidhoum-Rahal, and Juliette Walter)

This talk will present the first security and privacy analysis of the Neovote e-voting system, which was used for three of the five primaries in the French 2022 presidential election. Based on information gathered by a whistle-blower (now a member of the team) and analyses made by our team during the last online vote in January 2022, I will show that the demands of transparency, verifiability, and security set by French governmental organizations were not met. I will then propose multiple attacks against the system targeting both the breach of voters’ privacy and the manipulation of the tally. I will also show how inconsistencies in the verification system allow the publication of erroneous tallies and document how this arrived in practice during one of the primary elections. Finally, I will discuss the complex institutional and legal frameworks as well as the social considerations that allow systems like this one to flourish.

Dr. Enka Blanchard is a transdisciplinary permanent researcher working for the French National Centre for Scientific Research. A significant fraction of their work concerns the social and psychological aspects of security, especially when it comes to voting systems, on which they frequently collaborate with Ted Selker and Alan Sherman of UMBC. Prior to this, they were a post-doctoral fellow in the Digitrust Project of the University of Lorraine. Their research and contact information is available on their website: koliaza.com

Host: Alan T. Sherman, sherman@umbc.edu. Support for this event was provided in part by the National Science Foundation under SFS grant DGE-1753681. The UMBC Cyber Defense Lab meets biweekly Fridays 12-1 pm. All meetings are open to the public. CDL meetings will resume in fall 2022.

The post talk: More holes than cheese: Vulnerabilities of the e-voting system used in the 2022 French presidential election appeared first on Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering.

Please join the Bell Techlogix and Microsoft team to discuss the upcoming August 2022 Microsoft Anniversary.

We’ll review the anniversary paperwork, dive deep into the capabilities of Option A and Option B, and provide a forum for Q&A with the Bell Techlogix and Microsoft team. 

 Target Audience

Procurement Leads, IT leads 

 Presenters

Bell Techlogix Team and Microsoft Team 

Attention Graduating Seniors!

INSTRUCTIONS to UPLOAD 

Vandana Janeja and Christine Mallinson have received a two-year, $300,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to study deepfakes, focusing on audio clips. Deepfakes are images, videos, and sounds that are developed using artificial intelligence (AI) technology, but that are designed to appear as authentic, real-life recordings. They can be highly deceiving for audiences, impacting public opinion and behavior.

Through their NSF Early-Concept Grant for Exploratory Research (EAGER) award, Janeja and Mallinson will study and evaluate listener perceptions of audio deepfakes that have been created with varying degrees of linguistic complexity. This study will include training sessions to help listeners discern audio deepfakes. Informed by training and linguistic labels, this project will develop data science algorithms that can help people discern audio deepfakes. More broadly, their project will establish a new pathway for collaborative public-impact research across the social sciences and computing. 

UMBC was engaging in multi-disciplinary work between computing and the social sciences when NSF started this initiative. “We can’t solve big societal issues with an AI algorithm alone,” explains Janeja, professor and chair of information systems. She notes that collaboration between researchers in computing and sociolinguistics is essential to address complex, real-world problems that involve both technology and communication.

Evaluating listener perceptions

Deepfakes can contribute to the rapid spread of misinformation. The threat of deepfakes on social media has received some visibility, but they can appear in other contexts as well.

Janeja highlights an example, recently covered in The New York Times, of a situation when an employee at a well-known investment banking company flagged that a person on the other end of a call sounded like their voice was being digitally altered. After the call, the company found that the person on the call was a leader from a media company posing as a different leader at another firm.

With this type of scenario in mind, the research team will develop training sessions to help listeners improve their ability to recognize audio deepfakes with varying degrees of linguistic complexity, says Janeja, principal investigator (PI) on the grant. They will then evaluate the efficacy of those training sessions to help the listeners protect themselves against deception by audio deepfakes. Using linguistic features, the research team will also create data science algorithms to augment the information that a listener is presented with. 

The resulting tools will empower listeners to evaluate the accuracy and authenticity of information they see online, explains Mallinson, professor of language, literacy, and culture (LLC), and director of UMBC’s Center for Social Science Scholarship, who is also co-PI on the award. Participants will receive sociolinguistic training to help them develop a more finely-tuned ear for distinguishing linguistic details, and they will draw upon that information as they evaluate deepfakes.

Open-access tools

Mallinson’s work focuses on language as a socially and culturally embedded phenomenon. She explains that the linguistic complexity of audio deepfakes makes it challenging for listeners to distinguish them from natural speech and identify them as inauthentic misinformation. At the same time, linguistic training and tools can help address these challenges. By working together, experts in computing and linguistics can disentangle this complexity.

The EAGER grant is “high risk, high reward,” she says. It involves approaching a challenging phenomenon in an entirely new way, and building bridges across disciplines. Students studying both data science and the social sciences will develop the skills to identify audio deepfakes, which is uncommon, Mallinson explains. Success would mean helping people protect themselves against deception by deepfakes and increasing the equitability of AI technology.

Janeja and Mallinson’s project team will include UMBC data science scholars as well as Sara Khanjani, Ph.D. ‘24, information systems, and Lavon Davis, incoming LLC Ph.D. student. Khanjani also completed initial research informing the grant, along with Gabrielle Watson ‘21, information systems. That work explored college students’ audio deepfake perceptions. 

Khanjani looks forward to creating tutorials that can better prepare people to spot deepfakes. The team’s series of online educational modules will be openly accessible to the public, to help them improve their critical listening and discernment skills. 

Ultimately, Mallinson says, this interdisciplinary research in sociolinguistics and data science will better prepare people to navigate emerging communication issues in today’s technologically complex world. 

Mallinson and Janeja hope that in establishing an innovative pathway for collaborative research that fully integrates sociolinguistics, human-centered analytics, and data science, the study will also lay the groundwork for future analyses of deepfakes in ways that are broadly relevant to all of these fields.

Summary

This position is located at Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Office of RESEARCH. The purpose of this position is collect and analyze data from primary sources, develop reliable reports, and prepare economic, statistical, or financial analyses on well-defined questions.

See our tips on the application process and printable checklist to ensure each step of the application is completed.

Here's a link to the job: 

https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/careers/current-openings/research-assistant-22-cfpb-230-x/