James Brunet

Instructor I

• Azrieli Pavilion , Carleton University
• 1125 Colonel By Drive, Ottawa, ON, K1S 5B6
• Email James Brunet

James Brunet received a Master’s Degree in Engineering Science from Western University and an undergraduate degree in Computer Science from Carleton University. He teaches web application development and project management courses: Before teaching, he worked as a database administrator, security researcher, software developer, and technical trainer in the public, private, and nonprofit sectors.

Much of James’s past and present work is focused on Canadian elections, and his experience includes observing ballot counting, presenting at election security conferences, managing local political campaigns, discovering and disclosing security vulnerabilities in election technology, leading a provincial central campaign data team, conducting a broad standards-based review of online voting in Ontario, building predictive voter models, interviewing election administrators about their election processes, and providing cybersecurity guidance to candidates, political staff, and election administrators.

Research Areas

James conducts security research into technology used in Canadian elections, including online voting systems, automated tabulators, and e-poll books. As part of this research, he analyzes data breaches, service outages, voting technology, and election procedures to identify security risks to Canadian elections and recommend improvements. Through this work he has responsibly disclosed several security vulnerabilities in Canadian online voting providers, which were acknowledged and fixed by vendors. He’s worked directly with municipalities while conducting focus groups with municipal elections staff and presenting at the annual conference for Ontario’s senior municipal staff (AMCTO). James is a member of Carleton University’s Research Ethics Board (CUREB-B).

Research Topics

• Network security (Threat modelling, blockchain, usable security)