Bern, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Fifteen percent of Swiss citizens authorized to vote electronically took up the option in the 28 November federal, cantonal and communal votes. Electronic voting is gradually becoming more widely available but on a long-term test basis, with 12 cantons now making it available to at least some of their voters. The total number of people who can vote electronically, including several voter abroad, is now 193,236.
Swiss citizens living abroad can vote electronically only if their canton offers the option and they live in a country with which Switzerland has a treaty to allow encryption, one of the 45 nations that are part of the Wassenaar Arrangement.
The Wassenaar Arrangement describes its role as “promoting transparency and greater responsibility in transfers of conventional arms and dual-use goods and technologies, thus preventing destabilizing accumulations.”
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – ID Quantique, a leader in the business of network encryption, is focusing its business into three units, in order to simplify the face it presents to its customers. Grégoire Ribordy, CEO, says that the restructuring is “a new stage in the company’s life” and reflects the opportunities each business unit presents and the need for diversification in sometimes difficult markets.
Growth in the network encryption business was slow in 2009, Ribordy told GenevaLunch, but was nicely compensated for by strong growth in random number generation (RNG) and scientific instrumentation.
Lausanne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Mathematicians at EPFL, the Swiss federal polytechnic institute, used a cluster of more than 200 PlayStation 3 game consoles to spend six months solving an encryption problem, breaking a previous record set in 2002. The laboratory for cryptologic algorithms cracked a 112-bit encryption based on elliptical curves. The significance of the work is that it “may serve to boost our confidence in the strength of elliptic curve cryptography (ECC),” say the authors, led Joppe Bos and Marcelo Kaihara. Encryption is widely used in banking and other industries for security. The encryption industry struggles to stay ahead of code-cracking hackers, who are using increasingly sophisticated methods and calculators.
A 160-bit elliptical curve standard is scheduled to be phased out by the industry in 2010, but the EPFL calculation shows that “for the next decade no regular user needs to be overly concerned about the security of 160-bit ECC.”
