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Ronald L. Rivest, Viterbi Professor of Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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While running an election sounds simple, it is in fact extremely challenging. Not only are there millions of voters to be authenticated and millions of votes to be carefully collected, counted, and stored, there are now millions of "voting machines" containing millions of lines of code to be evaluated for security vulnerabilities. Moreover, voting systems have a unique requirement: the voter must not be given a "receipt" that would allow them to prove how they voted to someone else—otherwise the voter could be coerced or bribed into voting a certain way. This lack of receipts makes the security of voting system much more challenging than, say, the security of banking systems (where receipts are the norm).

We discuss some of the recent trends and innovations in voting systems, as well as some of the new requirements being placed upon voting systems in the U.S., and describe some promising directions for resolving the conflicts inherent in voting system requirements, including some approaches based on cryptography. We'll also briefly discuss "Internet voting."

Awarded Best Student Paper!
Do Incentives Build Robustness in BitTorrent?
Michael Piatek, Tomas Isdal, Thomas Anderson, and Arvind Krishnamurthy, University of Washington; Arun Venkataramani, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Exploiting Similarity for Multi-Source Downloads Using File Handprints
Himabindu Pucha, Purdue University; David G. Andersen, Carnegie Mellon University; Michael Kaminsky, Intel Research Pittsburgh

Cobra: Content-based Filtering and Aggregation of Blogs and RSS Feeds
Ian Rose, Rohan Murty, Peter Pietzuch, Jonathan Ledlie, Mema Roussopoulos, and Matt Welsh, Harvard University

Information Slicing: Anonymity Using Unreliable Overlays
Sachin Katti, Jeff Cohen, and Dina Katabi, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

SAAR: A Shared Control Plane for Overlay Multicast
Animesh Nandi, Rice University and Max Planck Institute for Software Systems; Aditya Ganjam, Carnegie Mellon University; Peter Druschel, Max Planck Institute for Software Systems; T.S. Eugene Ng, Rice University; Ion Stoica, University of California, Berkeley; Hui Zhang, Carnegie Mellon University; Bobby Bhattacharjee, University of Maryland

Ricochet: Lateral Error Correction for Time-Critical Multicast
Mahesh Balakrishnan and Ken Birman, Cornell University; Amar Phanishayee, Carnegie Mellon University; Stefan Pleisch, Cornell University

WiLDNet: Design and Implementation of High Performance WiFi Based Long Distance Networks
Rabin Patra and Sergiu Nedevschi, University of California, Berkeley, and Intel Research, Berkeley; Sonesh Surana, University of California, Berkeley; Anmol Sheth, University of Colorado, Boulder; Lakshminarayanan Subramanian, New York University; Eric Brewer, University of California, Berkeley, and Intel Research, Berkeley

S4: Small State and Small Stretch Routing Protocol for Large Wireless Sensor Networks
Yun Mao, University of Pennsylvania; Feng Wang, Lili Qiu, and Simon S. Lam, The University of Texas at Austin; Jonathan M. Smith, University of Pennsylvania

A Location-Based Management System for Enterprise Wireless LANs
Ranveer Chandra, Jitendra Padhye, Alec Wolman, and Brian Zill, Microsoft Research

See the list of accepted posters.

Beyond One-Third Faulty Replicas in Byzantine Fault Tolerant Systems
Jinyuan Li, VMware, Inc.; David Mazières, Stanford University

Ensuring Content Integrity for Untrusted Peer-to-Peer Content Distribution Networks
Nikolaos Michalakis, Robert Soulé, and Robert Grimm, New York University

TightLip: Keeping Applications from Spilling the Beans
Aydan R. Yumerefendi, Benjamin Mickle, and Landon P. Cox, Duke University

A Systematic Framework for Unearthing the Missing Links: Measurements and Impact
Yihua He, Georgos Siganos, Michalis Faloutsos, and Srikanth Krishnamurthy, University of California, Riverside

The Flexlab Approach to Realistic Evaluation of Networked Systems
Robert Ricci, Jonathon Duerig, Pramod Sanaga, Daniel Gebhardt, Mike Hibler, Kevin Atkinson, Junxing Zhang, Sneha Kasera, and Jay Lepreau, University of Utah

An Experimentation Workbench for Replayable Networking Research
Eric Eide, Leigh Stoller, and Jay Lepreau, University of Utah

Black-box and Gray-box Strategies for Virtual Machine Migration
Timothy Wood, Prashant Shenoy, and Arun Venkataramani, University of Massachusetts Amherst; Mazin Yousif, Intel, Portland

Awarded Best Paper!
Life, Death, and the Critical Transition: Finding Liveness Bugs in Systems Code
Charles Killian, James W. Anderson, Ranjit Jhala, and Amin Vahdat, University of California, San Diego

WiDS Checker: Combating Bugs in Distributed Systems
Xuezheng Liu, Wei Lin, Aimin Pan, and Zheng Zhang, Microsoft Research Asia

X-Trace: A Pervasive Network Tracing Framework
Rodrigo Fonseca, George Porter, Randy H. Katz, Scott Shenker, and Ion Stoica, University of California, Berkeley

Friday: Global Comprehension for Distributed Replay
Dennis Geels, Google, Inc.; Gautam Altekar, University of California at Berkeley; Petros Maniatis, Intel Research Berkeley; Timothy Roscoe, ETH Zürich; Ion Stoica, University of California at Berkeley

Network Coordinates in the Wild
Jonathan Ledlie, Harvard University; Paul Gardner, Aelitis; Margo Seltzer, Harvard University

Octant: A Comprehensive Framework for the Geolocalization of Internet Hosts
Bernard Wong, Ivan Stoyanov, and Emin Gün Sirer, Cornell University

dFence: Transparent Network-based Denial of Service Mitigation
Ajay Mahimkar, Jasraj Dange, Vitaly Shmatikov, Harrick Vin, and Yin Zhang, The University of Texas at Austin

R-BGP: Staying Connected in a Connected World
Nate Kushman, Srikanth Kandula, and Dina Katabi, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Bruce M. Maggs, Carnegie Mellon University

Mutually Controlled Routing with Independent ISPs
Ratul Mahajan, Microsoft Research; David Wetherall, University of Washington and Intel Research; Thomas Anderson, University of Washington

Tesseract: A 4D Network Control Plane
Hong Yan, Carnegie Mellon University; David A. Maltz, Microsoft Research; T.S. Eugene Ng, Rice University; Hemant Gogineni and Hui Zhang, Carnegie Mellon University; Zheng Cai, Rice University