Slashdot Mirror
Diebold Voting Systems Grossly Insecure
Several well-known security researchers have examined the code for Diebold's voting machines (which we last mentioned two weeks ago) and produced an extensive report (pdf). The NYT has a story on the report, which cuts to the bone: 'Our analysis shows that this voting system is far below even the most minimal security standards applicable in other contexts. We highlight several issues including unauthorized privilege escalation, incorrect use of cryptography, vulnerabilities to network threats, and poor software development processes. For example, common voters, without any insider privileges, can cast unlimited votes without being detected by any mechanisms within the voting terminal.'
Here the bit from the article that I find most interesting. To have security flaws is one thing. To not fix them even after you know about them is another.
'But Douglas W. Jones, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Iowa, said he was shocked to discover flaws cited in Mr. Rubin's paper that he had mentioned to the system's developers about five years ago as a state elections official.
'"To find that such flaws have not been corrected in half a decade is awful," Professor Jones said.'
"I don't know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve."
Anyone who's even briefly perused comp.risks, even before the post-US-Election-2000 debacle, wouldn't be the least bit surprised by these conclusions.
Scottie's Law strikes again (from Star Trek III): "The more they back up the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drains." The simpler the voting system (the less mechanical, electronic, electro-mechanical etc. etc.) is the less open it is to fraud (both officially and unofficially perpetrated) or error (both innocent and culpable).
One more reason I'm glad to live in Canada...
Still hoping for Gentle Treatment...
Any time there is a system, someone will be able to break or hack it. Especially a closed system that isn't open to scrutiny.
At least with the current voting system, while you're there you see everyone being handed 1 ballot, and turning in just 1 ballot. You see the ballot go in the sealed box. There's no secret about what your vote is doing, and no confusion about whether the vote was cast or not, or if anyone is turning in multiple ballots.
Some people, in comments widely circulated on the Internet, contend that the company's software has been designed to allow voter fraud. Mr. Rubin called such assertions "ludicrous" and said the software's flaws showed the hallmarks of poor design, not subterfuge.
"And this is my boy, Sherman. Speak, Sherman." "Hello." "Good boy."
Maybe you should try those ones. Weve been using those in Brazil for almost a a decade. Software code can be evaluated by independent institutions, and as far as I know it does not run Win32. Last elections the whole country used voting machines (no manual votes) And weve got the result (>100,000,000 in few hours).
how else can [insert current party in power] rig the next election
Well, rigging it in a state in which your brother is governor with a supreme court your daddy appointed should be pretty easy...
Hey freaks: now you're ju
...but in practice, it could simply be used as an argument FOR centralized, online voting. Please note that the current e-voting system currently in testing is Windows-specific... this could end up being a very bad thing. ("To vote, you must run one of the following operating systems: Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows ME, Windows 98. Other systems are not supported on www.evote.gov at this time. We apologize for any inconvenience this might cause...")
I KNOW I'm paranoid, but still...I like to think long-term.
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
This is a computer programmed by invisible software. The only record of a vote is a little counter in the guts of the computer program. There is absolutely no way to make it secure. Any system that records votes directly electronically is wide open.
The only difference is who can commit vote fraud. Now anyone who walks up to the machine can commit vote fraud. Even if all of these bugs fixed, large classes of vote fraud remain. The only difference would be that any random person on the street couldn't cheat. However, any custodian would still be able to re-image the drive. Any programmer at Diebold would be able to embed a trapdoor. In short, anyone with exclusive access to open the machine can cause it to cheat. And this 'best case' is only if they fix all of the bugs.
Thats not a lot better. Even the writers of the paper couldn't make a cheat-proof DRE voting program. If an adversary controls the hardware, they control the software. Fundamentally, any non-trivial computer system is not trustworthy; any system whose security depends on a computer should be transformed where the security no longer depends on the correctness of the computer.
For instance, the only nominally trustworthy computer voting scheme is to have the computer be nothing other than a super-intelligent pencil. The voter uses the computer which prints out a paper ballot. The user observes and confirms the paper ballot is correct, then the ballot is dropped into a box. The computer may record results, but as the computer is untrustworthy, those results are untrustworthy. Now, the security and trustworthyness of the computer doesn't matter.
Every security researcher, including the authors of the paper advocates this scheme, but they are ignored by election officials. This includes the two professors who authored the paper, Peter Neumann, and Douglas Jones from the NY Times article, Rivest---the R in RSA--- and hundreds of others.
See: http://www.verifiedvoting.org/index.asp
This is a secure voting system. Brazil has it (and at a tenth the price). Any system without a printer requires 'trusted hardware' in an adversarial environment. Control the hardware, control the election.
Your joke made me laugh. But the sad thing is that it is the whole point of voting machines.
A paper ballot and a pen is the only form of ballot I trust. And if they don't count the ballots AT THE POLLING PLACE in plain view of the public BEFORE they ship them off to the court house you can't trust the result.
Paper ballot boxes get tampered with all the time. A machine that most people couldn't understand is NOT going to make voting less prone to fraud. If I can't take apart the machanical voting machine to see if it works correctly and I can't look at the code of a computer program and see if it works correctly then why SHOULD I trust it?
We allready had a major election full of obvious vote fraud(On both sides. Bush was just better at it THIS TIME. Gore was just as crooked just not as effective.) Voting machines are just one more way to cloud the issue. A voting shell game run by slick con men.
DEMAND paper ballots! Demand that votes be counted and posted AT THE POLL. Any thing else is a sham!
Slashdot, home of supporters of free software, free music, and free speech.Except for Moderators that disagree with you.
All the truely qualified software engineers are not unemployed. If you have the skills to back up what's written on your resume, there really is no problem finding a job.
Sorry, but that's bullshit. Have you been unemployeed recently? You are aware that the economy is in one of the worst states it's been in since the Great Depression?
There are many qualified people who have trouble finding jobs.
I know a number of well qualified people in a number of sectors who have trouble finding work. This includes Java engineers with over 6 years java experience, Unix admins with 10+ years experience, telecom folks, production managers, office managers, etc. Most sectors of the economy are suffering.
Finding a job depends on networking-- who do you know that can help you get a job. Technical skills are very secondary.
In the SF Bay Area, we're flirting with a 10% unemployment rate in the tech sector. 25% of residents in the Bay Area have been laid off in the last several years. Average job search lasts 8 months.
That is caused by more then the "java in 21 days" problem that you suggested.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
If the bank thought they could save money by upgrading ATMs, they would do so, and pocket the extra money. Obviously they don't think so.
That is all very true, but that doesn't make it any better. To the bank, an occasional $2000 fraud isn't a big deal--it's a little money added on to some fees, maybe they lose the customer that was defrauded, and putting a secure ATM infrastructure in place would indeed be much more expensive. But to the person losing $2000 and spending hours on the phone trying to get the money back and trying to restore their good name, the loss is much bigger than the financial loss to the bank. That is what makes the bank's attitude so callous. In fact, banks should face stiff penalties when fraud does occur so that their financial objectives are brought in line with the harm they cause; then, they would fix ATMs.
For voting machines, the situation is even worse: there is little or no auditing or verification possible, either for individuals or auditors, and nobody loses money from misregistered votes. So, if the ATM vendors reason the same way for on-line voting as they do for banking, the kind of reasoning you applied, then they really don't care at all about security. And that's just what we are seeing. And that is exactly the reason why ATM vendors are completely unsuitable to handle these things: they have already demonstrated that they will optimize for profit, not for security. For creating on-line voting systems, we need organizations that are dedicated to security, not profit maximization.
Yeah. And the odds of my being audited increase or decrease based upon whom I voted for?
You cannot attach the name of the voter to the ballot and expect free votes.
Q: But this is America - who would dare rig an election here?
A: The first person that thought they could get away with it.
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!