For distributed systems security analysis, lottery ticket systems are interesting to study. Lots of loosely coupled distributed partners that form a federation to broker trust and exchange real value. What happens when a node goes bad though? Here is what happened in Silicon Valley:
San Jose - A sting operation by the Santa Clara County Sheriff's Department has resulted in a group of South Bay convenience store clerks facing charges of stealing winning Lottery tickets. The California Lottery aided in the investigation
The California Lottery printed up a number of winning Lottery tickets for the deputies to use while they went undercover. The deputies would walk into convenience stores, hand those winning tickets to the clerk and wait to see what happened next.
In nine cases, the clerk scanned the ticket, saw that it was a winner, but told the deputy, "Sorry. Better luck next time." In several cases, the clerks turned around and tried to cash those winning tickets for themselves.
Why are they relying on the clerks in the first place? Why not have an Internet portal that you can type your number into?
Posted by: Iang | March 14, 2009 at 05:58 AM