Vanessa Joy Teague is an Australian cryptographer, known for her work on secret sharing, cryptographic protocols, and the security of electronic voting. She was an associate professor of computing and information systems at the University of Melbourne, [1] [2] until resigning in February 2020 [3] and is an Adjunct Associate Professor at the ANU College of Engineering and Computer Science. [4] She is a member of the Board of Advisors of the Verified Voting Foundation. [5] [6]
Teague did her undergraduate studies at the University of Melbourne. [2] In 2005 she completed a Ph.D. in computer science at Stanford University. Her dissertation, Combining Cryptography and Game Theory in Distributed Algorithms, was supervised by John C. Mitchell. [2] [7] Her time as a graduate student in the US overlapped with the 2000 United States presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore, and the controversy over the vote recount sparked her interest in the integrity of elections. [6]
In 2017, Teague showed that historical data from the Australian Medicare Benefits Scheme that had supposedly been stripped of identifying details could be re-associated with the names of individual patients. [8] [9]
In 2018, she and Chris Culnane found a security flaw in the New Zealand census, in which the personal data of New Zealanders, supposedly confidential to the New Zealand government, were actually routed through and visible to a company in New York. [10]
In 2019, Teague was part of a team that discovered a flaw in the Swiss national internet voting system that would allow undetected alteration of vote outcomes. [11] The same flaw was later discovered to be present in voting systems in New South Wales, whose electoral commission nevertheless declared them to be safe to use. [12]
Teague also became an outspoken critic of Australia's 2019 anti-encryption laws, [13] at the same time that a change in Australian defence policy severely limited her ability to discuss matters related to cryptography with researchers in other countries. [14]
In 2016 the Election Verification Network recognized Teague as the winner of their Election Integrity Research Excellence Award. [2] [15]
In cryptography, encryption is the process of transforming information in a way that, ideally, only authorized parties can decode. This process converts the original representation of the information, known as plaintext, into an alternative form known as ciphertext. Despite its goal, encryption does not itself prevent interference but denies the intelligible content to a would-be interceptor.
A cypherpunk is one who advocates the widespread use of strong cryptography and privacy-enhancing technologies as a means of effecting social and political change. The cypherpunk movement originated in the late 1980s and gained traction with the establishment of the "Cypherpunks" electronic mailing list in 1992, where informal groups of activists, technologists, and cryptographers discussed strategies to enhance individual privacy and resist state or corporate surveillance. Deeply libertarian in philosophy, the movement is rooted in principles of decentralization, individual autonomy, and freedom from centralized authority. Its influence on society extends to the development of technologies that have reshaped global finance, communication, and privacy practices, such as the creation of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, which embody cypherpunk ideals of decentralized and censorship-resistant money. The movement has also contributed to the mainstreaming of encryption in everyday technologies, such as secure messaging apps and privacy-focused web browsers. The cypherpunk ethos has had a lasting impact on debates around digital rights, surveillance, and personal freedoms in the 21st century. The movement has been active since at least 1990 and continues to inspire initiatives aimed at fostering a more private and secure digital world.
Communications security is the discipline of preventing unauthorized interceptors from accessing telecommunications in an intelligible form, while still delivering content to the intended recipients.
A secure cryptoprocessor is a dedicated computer-on-a-chip or microprocessor for carrying out cryptographic operations, embedded in a packaging with multiple physical security measures, which give it a degree of tamper resistance. Unlike cryptographic processors that output decrypted data onto a bus in a secure environment, a secure cryptoprocessor does not output decrypted data or decrypted program instructions in an environment where security cannot always be maintained.
Ross John Anderson was a British researcher, author, and industry consultant in security engineering. He was Professor of Security Engineering at the Department of Computer Science and Technology, University of Cambridge where he was part of the University's security group.
Ronald Linn Rivest is an American cryptographer and computer scientist whose work has spanned the fields of algorithms and combinatorics, cryptography, machine learning, and election integrity. He is an Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and a member of MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and its Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
The International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR) is a non-profit scientific organization that furthers research in cryptology and related fields. The IACR was organized at the initiative of David Chaum at the CRYPTO '82 conference.
David Lee Chaum is an American computer scientist, cryptographer, and inventor. He is known as a pioneer in cryptography and privacy-preserving technologies, and widely recognized as the inventor of digital cash. His 1982 dissertation "Computer Systems Established, Maintained, and Trusted by Mutually Suspicious Groups" is the first known proposal for a blockchain protocol. Complete with the code to implement the protocol, Chaum's dissertation proposed all but one element of the blockchain later detailed in the Bitcoin whitepaper. He has been referred to as "the father of online anonymity", and "the godfather of cryptocurrency".
Electronic voting is voting that uses electronic means to either aid or take care of casting and counting ballots including voting time.
In cryptography, a message authentication code (MAC), sometimes known as an authentication tag, is a short piece of information used for authenticating and integrity-checking a message. In other words, to confirm that the message came from the stated sender and has not been changed. The MAC value allows verifiers to detect any changes to the message content.
A cryptographic protocol is an abstract or concrete protocol that performs a security-related function and applies cryptographic methods, often as sequences of cryptographic primitives. A protocol describes how the algorithms should be used and includes details about data structures and representations, at which point it can be used to implement multiple, interoperable versions of a program.
Matt Blaze is an American researcher who focuses on the areas of secure systems, cryptography, and trust management. He is currently the McDevitt Chair of Computer Science and Law at Georgetown University, and is on the board of directors of the Tor Project.
Gustavus J. Simmons is a retired cryptographer and former manager of the applied mathematics Department and Senior Fellow at Sandia National Laboratories. He worked primarily with authentication theory, developing cryptographic techniques for solving problems of mutual distrust and in devising protocols whose function could be trusted, even though some of the inputs or participants cannot be.
Cryptography, or cryptology, is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of adversarial behavior. More generally, cryptography is about constructing and analyzing protocols that prevent third parties or the public from reading private messages. Modern cryptography exists at the intersection of the disciplines of mathematics, computer science, information security, electrical engineering, digital signal processing, physics, and others. Core concepts related to information security are also central to cryptography. Practical applications of cryptography include electronic commerce, chip-based payment cards, digital currencies, computer passwords, and military communications.
geli is a block device-layer disk encryption system written for FreeBSD, introduced in version 6.0. It uses the GEOM disk framework. It was designed and implemented by Paweł Jakub Dawidek.
Matthew Daniel Green is an American cryptographer and security technologist. Green is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the Johns Hopkins Information Security Institute. He specializes in applied cryptography, privacy-enhanced information storage systems, anonymous cryptocurrencies, elliptic curve crypto-systems, and satellite television piracy. He is a member of the teams that developed the Zerocoin anonymous cryptocurrency and Zerocash. He has also been influential in the development of the Zcash system. He has been involved in the groups that exposed vulnerabilities in RSA BSAFE, Speedpass and E-ZPass. Green lives in Baltimore, MD with his wife, Melissa, 2 children and 2 miniature dachshunds.
In information security, message authentication or data origin authentication is a property that a message has not been modified while in transit and that the receiving party can verify the source of the message.
John Alexander Halderman is an American computer scientist. He currently serves as a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Michigan, as well as being the director of the Center for Computer Security and Society at Michigan Engineering. His research focuses on computer security and privacy, with an emphasis on problems that broadly impact society and public policy.
Nadia Heninger is an American cryptographer, computer security expert, and computational number theorist at the University of California, San Diego.
Scytl Election Technologies S.L.U., is a Spanish electronic voting system and election technology company. Founded in 2001 in Barcelona, its products and services have been used in elections and referendums in many countries.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Academics | |
