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Electronic Voting Machine Cracker Challenge
An anonymous reader writes "In the ongoing debate on the security of electronic voting, an Atlanta area programmer has confronted Georgia election officials on the potential for fraud in its statewide electronic voting system. She claims that she can be prepared to crack the system within a week, and officials have accepted the challenge." What makes this even more interesting is that the election officials are encouraging the woman, so that any possible exploit can be found and remedied.
The Diebold system does have major flaws. I was just at the Crypto2003 conference where one of the talks was on the faults in this system. Amongst other things, when they pointed out the major errors in code, the company replied back calling DES (or DSA, I forget) a compression scheme, and they implemented an algorithm from Handbook of Applied Crypto for purposes of encryption with a value listed in the book that says explicitly "Do not use this for cryptographic purposes"
have destroyed the record of the 2002 election, in defiance of federal law. they have stated that the election went smoothly.
Right before the election, an uncertified patch was installed to all the voting machines in Georgia. There were some stunning upsets in the race. Saxby Chambliss and Sonny Perdue won in dramatic, come from behind fashion.
the Libertarian party candidate has issued a formal request for the voting records, the ones that have been destroyed.
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What they mean is that they would be able to look at the system after she has had it and then figure out whether or not every vote was a valid one. They gave her the equipment to work with so she will be able to add authorized votes and unauthorized ones. Only she will know which are the unathorized ones. The state will then examine the system to determine if they can detect whether any of the votes are unauthorized. Presumably each vote is digitally signed in such a way that the state feels that she will not be able to duplicate the signature. Then after the state determines which votes were unauthorized she'll turn around and tell them if they erroneously counted invalid votes as valid ones. Presumably because she figured out how to duplicate the digital signatures. Then she'll show them how she did it and why they weren't able to detect them.
While I agree that there are flaws with going to an electronic ballot, there are several advantages over paper ballots.
As an example I live in a voting district that Senetor Wellstone represented. As a result of his plane crash and death two weeks before the general election Voting involved suplementary ballots for the senate seat he had been running for. The paper ballots had already been printed as the normal date for candidates to declare had already passed. Suplementary ballots had to be printed when Mondale ran as the party candidate replacement for Wellstone.
An electronic voting system would have mearly required a change to the template each voting machine used for the election.
Other advantages include faster reporting of vote counts. Though this can normaly be handled by an electronic counter for paper ballots (using the filled oval method)
One method of making a paper count possible with an electronic ballot system would be to print a paper copy of the selections made by the voter, and have the voter initial that the copy is what they chose, which then gets filed. It could be as simple as a table of offices with the selected candidate. A large number of ballots with the same initials would be a flag for concern as it may show an election official is not following the accepted procedure. Initials would not be generally traceable back to the person who made that mark.
A series of numbers at the top or bottom of the page, or as an additional table entry would provide a machine readable version of the selection. I don't know of any election official who would relish the thought of going through 10,000 or 100,000 (or more) ballots and reading off each name.
Then again, that's just my view.
-Rusty
You never know...
At least in a paper voting world, there needs to be some semblance of a paper trail record to be available for recounting.
While such systems can be manipulated, it takes quite a lot of people in the loop to do so. Voter early, vote often; run a steel rod through any Republican ballots in Democratic areas...
The move to scannable ballots using sharpie markers is a bit better but physical security of those are questionable as they allow thermal printouts and often have the covers open at the polling places.
Right now, if I want to steal an election, I probably have to bury my opponent in the places that I control the entire polling apparatus with my political party hacks. It looks crude and messy to anyone who watches.
Now if we have all the local precincts reporting frequently into a central computer system with two way back door communications; we can easily determine the number of manufactured ballots needed and allocate them over a greater number of precincts without drawing any attention at all.
An example of this is a weighted average cost bid, I have personal experience with this. If we know that there are two items on the list; one says it will buy a million of an item and the other says it will buy 3 of the item but the quantities are reversed. I can make my evaluated bid much lower and rape the buyer by biddin no cost for the first item and $10,000 for the second item (assuming both are worth $1000); however the bid will look really, really abnormal compared to the other bidders and they are going to smell a rat even if they don't know the real quantities to be bought.
However, were I to just shade the bid a bit by lowering the cost on one and raising on the other I could win the bid, have higher margins and no one be any the wiser. OK, the example of a million vs 3 is too extreme but so is the ballot count for Democrats in these key urban areas coming in higher than the total number of living and dead there.
If the election comes in as the controlling power wishes, there is no need to do anything. If it is off track, they can certainly round up people on buses to vote but they can also create some new ballots that will be totally untraceable.
All electronic balloting is not to be trusted.
Computers do many wonderful things, counting elections is not one of them.
D
Curious for more about this story, the best background I found was here.. Also, this bill seems to be starting down a better path toward a publicly viewable system. Not sure about the paper trail part though.
I tried posting a story about the EVM2003 project a couple weeks ago, but unfortunately it was rejected. I'll try again soon, I suppose. So this note is a little less complete (not all the background URLs and the like). The project comes out of several years of background work by some well known computer scientists, political scientists, lawyers, elections officials, and political activists. But the demo (to be written in Python, btw), is just starting development.
Anyway, the short story is that I am involved in a project to create an open source voting system, with the extra twist that the machines also produce printed ballots. That is, the electronic part makes selection more clear, and prevent overvotes and other errors, but after using the touchscreen (or mouse, or blind accomodation), voters can visually verify their ballot for accuracy before submitting it to the ballot box.
Read an announcement of the project at http://gnosis.cx/voting-project/announce.html.
Check out the sourceforge page for EVM2003. We also have a mailing list archive.
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Avi Ruben was probably a fool for not divesting or disclosing his interest in a pseudo-competitor, but why isn't anyone screaming about Senator Chuck Hagel's ownership of Diebold? here's a version of the story. But where are the mainstream media accounts of this in relation to Hagel's unprecedented win in Nebraska using election machines his own company sold! And then he apparently failed to disclose this for years.
Frankly, if voting is going to be electronic and this insecure, I'd prefer to vote via the web. Better yet, I'll go vote via Taco Bell.