Page 7 - GCN, March and April 2017

States resist DHS designation
BY MARK ROCKWELL
The National Association of Sec- retaries of State voted in Febru-
ary to oppose the Department of Homeland Security’s designation of state election systems as federally protected critical infrastructure. The designation, announced in January, puts election systems on the same footing as the energy and financial services sectors.
Some states, such as Arizona, took DHS up on its offer to conduct cybersecurity scans of some of their systems in the wake of attempted hacks into voter registration systems.
Others, however, are wary of allowing federal agencies into state-managed facilities for fear of actual or implied federal influence or management.
“We want to send a loud and clear message to rescind the des- ignation,” said Kay Stimson, NASS director of communications.
She added that transparency is at the heart of election systems, and the federal designation could cloud that transparency — in reality or in the minds of voters. States are will- ing to work with federal partners, but the critical infrastructure desig- nation brings too much uncertainty about the federal government’s role, Stimson said.
She also said the dangers have been overstated because the amount of potentially vulnerable election equipment is small. •
NIST seeks quantum- resistant encryption
BY BRIAN ROBINSON
Officials at the National Institute of Standards and Technology have taken the first steps to tackle the threats that quantum computers pose to current data encryption methods.
The agency issued a formal re- quest for proposals for Post-Quantum Cryptography Standardization at the end of 2016. The focus is on gathering ideas that would lead to a “complete and proper” candidate algorithm for public-key standards.
The algorithm would complement three existing NIST products: the FIPS 186-4 Digital Signature Standard and special publications 800-56A Revision 2 and 800-56B, which refer to pairwise key-establishment schemes.
The new NIST program is on a fairly
retro tech
tight deadline for developing such
a complex algorithm, with Nov. 30, 2017, set as the deadline for proposals. Algorithms that meet NIST’s accept- ability requirements will be presented at an open workshop in early 2018. The evaluation that follows could take three to five years.
NIST officials made their concerns clear in a report on the status of quan- tum computing research a year ago. In the past, it wasn’t clear that a quantum computer was physically possible, but “many scientists now believe it to be merely a significant engineering chal- lenge,” the report states.
Once the quantum machines do ar- rive, they could be used to break codes, such as the widely used RSA public- key encryption, in far less time than it would take traditional computers. •
GCN has covered government IT since 1982, and the technology itself started earlier still. To wit: The Census Bureau began relying heavily on UNIVAC systems starting in 1960, after deploying its first UNIVAC I in 1951.
(Census Bureau photo, circa 1960)
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