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Online Voting In 2004 To Require Windows
letxa2000 writes "According to this article at CBS, a trial Internet voting system will be made available to 100,000 voters in 2004--particularly military and overseas U.S. citizens. As an American living overseas I think this is a step in the right direction. But the article also says 'Voters using SERVE can register to vote and cast their ballots from any computer using Microsoft Windows with Internet access.' Why the Windows requirement? Is that really going to make online voting secure?"
Great... so they're securing the hell out of the server which accepts the vote. No problem there. How about the client machines? What if I were to write a worm program which spread innocuously through emails with the sole purpose of modifying the user's web browser.
i ewpqkd
i ewpqkd
Once the protocol is understood, this shouldn't be too difficult to do. Likely it'll be on a secure site, maybe password protected. Doesn't matter. The modified web browser waits until the user visits http://vote.us.gov or wherever, watches the variables being passed, and simply modifies them. Instead of:
name=John+Smith
secretcode=K38DJSH38
password=a
vote=Al+Gore
It changes it to:
name=John+Smith
secretcode=K38DJSH38
password=a
vote=George+W.+Bush
Securing the server is all well and good, but they'll need to think really hard about securing the client side as well. Hint: the choice of who to vote for should also be encoded and (preferably) signed against the user's information. So the vote shouldn't be for "Al Gore" but for a signed and encrypted string which represents Al Gore, making it impossible to derive the signed and encrypted string for "George W. Bush".
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
Also look at This story and the related pages at The Scoop. The most widely deployed system in the US is based on MS Access (!?!), with NO controls for cryptographic storage, trasport, data integrity and/or non-repudiation.
Baaaa, Baaaa! Computers Better! Paper Worse! It's mere superstition by the Sheep-people.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Apparently, there is a scientifically sound way of doing e-voting, although it would require someone much better versed in math than I, to confirm this. I once heard Vince Rijmen (of AES "Rijndael" fame) describe ways to ensure some essential, and apparently contradictory, guarantees in e-voting (it was in an EU country, so pls forgive the EU-centricity - I have a history, you insensitive clod.. :-) ):
/.ers will draw Vince into an online discussion about this, so we can all find out whether he really has this magical solution, or he was just advertising his new company. Make it an "Ask /.", for example.
Authentication: Assuring that one votes oneself, that one's vote is not falsified, and that one has voted, at all. (some EU countries have mandatory voting)
Anonimity: Assuring that it is impossible for a third party to determine who I've voted for.
Correctability: assuring that I can modify my vote for a certain period after it has been cast (because there is no oversight in voting at home, I could have been coerced to vote a certain way, e.g. by someone coming into my home and holding a gun against my head, and should be able to correct this).
Vince described how he and his fellows at Cryptomathic found ways to project some basic mathematical techniques onto PKI, to ensure all of the above, and therefore allow for mathematically provable e-voting. Essentially making the voting process much more certain and transparant than was ever possible using conventional techniques.
I was solemnly impressed. It sounded too good to be true. I sincerely hope some of you mathematically unchallenged