Professor Vanessa Teague

I am interested in cryptographic protocols that support a free and democratic society. I work on openly-available research and open-source software for supporting democratic decision making and empowering ordinary people to make choices about their own data.

My research focuses primarily on cryptographic methods for achieving security and privacy, particularly for issues of public interest such as election integrity and the protection of government data. Recently I have focused on election auditing, particularly for complex voting methods such as the preferential systems used in Australia. I founded Democracy Developers to build open-source software for supporting democracy. We recently extended Colorado's risk-limiting audit software for instant runoff voting (IRV), using techniques we developed in Australia. This ran successfully in local elections in 2025.

I was part of the team that discovered the easy re-identification of doctors and patients in the Medicare/PBS open dataset released by the Australian Department of Health. I have also co-designed numerous protocols for improved election integrity in e-voting systems, and co-discovered serious weaknesses in the cryptography of deployed e-voting systems in New South Wales, Western Australia and Switzerland. I contributed technical expertise to the Tikanga in Technology project at the University of Waikato.

Selected papers and reports

Election auditing

• Michelle Blom, Philip B. Stark, Peter J. Stuckey, Vanessa Teague, Damjan Vukcevic (2022) Assessing the accuracy of the Australian Senate count: Key steps for a rigorous and transparent audit
• Michelle Blom, Peter J. Stuckey, Vanessa Teague (2025) Democracy Developers Guide to Risk Limiting Audits with RAIRE, Part 1: Auditing IRV Elections with RAIRE and Part 2: Generating Assertions with RAIRE
• Michelle Blom, Jurlind Budurushi, Ronald L. Rivest, Philip B. Stark, Peter J. Stuckey, Vanessa Teague, Damjan Vukcevic (2021) Assertion-Based Approaches to Auditing Complex Elections, with Application to Party-List Proportional Elections

Voting protocol security

• Chris Culnane, Andrew Conway, Vanessa Teague, Ty Wilson-Brown (2024) Security analysis of the Australian Capital Territory's eVACS 2020/2024 paperless direct recording electronic voting system
• Thomas Haines, Sarah Jamie Lewis, Olivier Pereira, Vanessa Teague (2020) How not to prove your election outcome
• J. Alex Halderman, Vanessa Teague (2015) The New South Wales iVote System: Security Failures and Verification Flaws in a Live Online Election

STV counting and margin-finding

• Andrew Conway, Michelle Blom, Lee Naish, Vanessa Teague (2016) An analysis of New South Wales electronic vote counting
• Vanessa Teague and Andrew Conway (2022) iVote Issues: Assessment of potential impacts on the 2021 NSW Local Government Elections

Privacy and re-identification

• Chris Culnane, Ben Rubinstein, Vanessa Teague (2017) Health Data in an Open World

My Google Scholar page contains the complete list of publications.