selected publications

See my full CV or Google Scholar for more information.

  1. Security Analysis of the Democracy Live Online Voting System Michael A. Specter, and J. Alex Halderman 2021 To appear, Usenix Security 2021!
    Press: The New York Times, Ars Technica, Ars Technica (again), AAAS [Abstract +] [PDF]
  2. KeyForge: Mitigating Email Breaches with Forward-Forgeable Signatures Michael A. Specter, Sunoo Park, and Matthew Green 2021 To appear, Usenix Security 2021! [Abstract +] [PDF]
  3. Going from Bad to Worse: From Internet Voting to Blockchain Voting Sunoo Park, Michael A. Specter, Neha Narula, and Ronald L. Rivest 2020 In Submission [PDF]
  4. The Ballot is Busted Before the Blockchain: A Security Analysis of Voatz, the First Internet Voting Application Used in US Federal Elections Michael A. Specter, James Koppel, and Daniel Weitnzer In 29th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 20) 2020 Acceptance Rate: 16.1%
    Press: The New York Times, The Verge, Vice, Vice (again), CNN, Fortune, The Economist, FiveThirtyEight, Commended in Senator Ron Wyden’s Keynote at DEFCON [Abstract +] [PDF]
  5. The PACT Protocol Specification Ronald L. Rivest, Jon Callas, Ran Canetti, Kevin Esvelt, Daniel Kahn Gillmor, Yael Tauman Kalai, Anna Lysyanskaya, Adam Norige, Ramesh Raskar, Adi Shamir, Israel Shen, Michael A. Specter, Vanessa Teague, Ari Trachtenberg, Mayank Varia, Marc Viera, Daniel Weitzner, John Wilkinson, and Marc Zissman 2020 [Abstract +] [PDF]
  6. The Economics of Cryptographic Trust: Understanding Certificate Authorities Michael Alan Specter, 2016
  7. Keys Under Doormats: Mandating Insecurity by Requiring Government Access to All Data and Communications Harold Abelson, Ross Anderson, Steven M. Bellovin, Josh Benaloh, Matt Blaze, Whitfield Diffie, John Gilmore, Matthew Green, Susan Landau, Peter G. Neumann, Ronald L. Rivest, Jeffrey I Schiller, Bruce Schneier, Michael A. Specter, and Daniel J. Weitzner Journal of Cybersecurity 2015 Published in: Oxford University Press, and the Communications of the ACM
    Names listed alphabetically.
    Press: The New York Times, TechCrunch, Ars Technica, MIT Technology Review, Cited by Congresswoman Anna Eshoo & Senator Ron Wyden, [Abstract +] [PDF]
  8. Security Analysis of Wearable Fitness Devices (Fitbit) Britt Cyr, Webb Horn, Daniela Miao, and Michael A. Specter Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2014
  9. Explaining Explanations: An Overview of Interpretability of Machine Learning Leilani H. Gilpin, David Bau, Ben Z. Yuan, Ayesha Bajwa, Michael A. Specter, and Lalana Kagal In 2018 IEEE 5th International Conference on data science and advanced analytics (DSAA) Acceptance Rate: 20%