Pentagon Cancels Internet Voting System

Ben B writes "The Pentagon won't use an Internet voting system for overseas U.S. citizens this fall because of concerns about its security, an official said Thursday. The official, who requested anonymity, said Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz made the decision to scrap the system because Pentagon officials were not certain they could 'assure the legitimacy of votes that would be cast.' Computer security experts who last month reviewed the Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment, or SERVE, had urged the Pentagon to scrap the system, saying it was too vulnerable."

Comments

I really have to question

[barenaked]

I question the whole premise of using the internet in the voting process. The flaws are unsolvable because they are fundamental to the architecture of the internet. Using a voting system based upon the internet poses a serious and unacceptable risk for election fraud. It is simply not secure enough for something as serious as the election of a government official. The report recommends that the Serve project be shut down and nothing like it be tried until "both the internet and the world's home computer infrastructure have been fundamentally redesigned, or some other unforeseen security breakthroughs appear." With which I wholeheartedly agree

Re:I really have to question

[El]

Unless you assume that the machine doing the encryption has already been compromised.

Re:I really have to question

[osewa77]

High security can always be layered on top of the 'unreliable' internet as it is; the problem is that the stock software has so many easily exploited loopholes (trojans? keyword capture? windows exploits?) that it would introduce messy, situations, which would not help the current government's bid for the next elections (better safe than sorry?)

Re:I really have to question

[gewalker]

In Florida they had a big fiasco. They tried to fix it by recounting the PAPER ballots repeatedly. This did not make anyone too happy either. George W. won all of the recounts, including ones done by the independent press, but lots of people still argue a fix was on, Bush stole the election, etc. -- Note:, I'm not arguing that Bush did or did not steal the election, or if he would be the first that had if he did -- I'm focusing on the controversy surrounding it to the day.

How in the world would the U.S. react if you could reasonably argue that the system could have been hacked, etc. -- Strikes me that this would be a very chaotic result.

The Internet based system does not and probably cannot have a useful audit trail that is equivalent to the paper ballots.
Foreign nationals are certainly limited in their voting flexibility and I think the Pentagon was trying to incorporate them betting in the voting process. Is there not a reasonable compromise that would meets the needs of voters and voting integrity?

Re:I really have to question

[sholden]

People vote differently in secret ballots than they do in public ballots. That's a pretty significant reason to keep them.

Secret ballots prevent many problems associated with elections (breaking the legs of those who don't vote how you told them, for example). Of course with non-compulsary voting you can perform similar attacks anyway - prevent a bunch of people who will cast more votes for your opposition than for you from voting at all.

The UK has a system in which votes are tagged with unique identifiers that match a voter to a ballot - but the link is locked away somewhere "safe" and legally can't be accessed except on a court order and are destroyed after a year. That provides most of the benefits of a secret ballot, but still allows the votes to be checked if the election is suspect. See here for a short blurb on the system.

Now whether than system is good or bad is another matter, but it shows you can have some of the benefits of a secret ballot and also the main benefit of a non-secret ballot.

Re:I really have to question

[MillionthMonkey]

You can solve all manner of these types of problems using certificates with high encryption strength.

No you can't. People concentrate on encryption strength as if that's everything. It's like the height of a wall. Doubling it doesn't help if people can walk around the wall. The key length is only one of many vulnerabilities in a system. Think of all the computer security breaches you've heard about. How many happened because an attacker succeeded in brute forcing a key? As opposed to, say, using an easily guessed default password? Unless you're using DES, or crappy exportable encryption, brute forced keyspaces are probably not how you will go down.

What you have here is something that is pretending to be a solution to a problem that is pretending to be a solution in search of a problem. There are really two problems here- the one you are addressing (short key length), and a more fundamental one, which is that there is no reason for we the voting public to be hearing the words "Internet" and "voting" in the same sentence at all, nor is there any reason why we should have to assume a collective responsibility for safeguarding our own votes in this election process when we weren't even the ones who had anything to gain from endangering the democratic process in the first place.

Re:I really have to question

[Free_Meson]

But then the Supreme Court stepped in at the Republicans request

Yeah... after the Democrats took it to the courts to begin with.

Neither party's hands are clean in the whole fiasco.

I hope you aren't saying that it was somehow wrong to take that election to court. That's the reason we have courts -- when everything else breaks down, they are the final arbiters of right and wrong. They are the referees that determine which rules are just and how they should be interpreted and enforced. You can't have a truly democratic system without a powerful court because those abused by the tyranny of the majority have no recourse. As for the case of Gore v. Bush, it looks like the court failed. It didn't fail because Bush won (though I would have prefered Gore), it failed because in a situation that needed a conclusive end it rendered the worst possible verdict for the sanctity of democracy in the United States. They said that a recount should happen, but becuase of an artificial deadline ~50 days before the winner would take office and less than a day after the decision, a full recount requiring less than a week would just be too inconvenient to endure. The case should have been about how to count the votes, with the democrats arguing one way and the republicans arguing another. Instead, the republican council argued that there should be no recount at all... As a litigation tactic, this was good -- if you won the first count, argue against any subsequent recounts. As it concerns the country, though, this was a horrible argument, and a less radical court would have seen the importance of deciding the election with a universal standard of fairness rather than doing what it did. The Gore v. Bush decision may have been the single worst supreme court decision since the Dred Scott v. Sanford decision, but at least in Scott the court had a sound legal principle to support its decision.

Anyway, I can't believe you're claiming the democrats should somehow be blamed or tarnished for seeking a recount in an election where equal protection had obviously been violated. The fact that such a request even made it into a court should tell you that the republican party, at least at the time, cared more about being in power than it cared about the democratic nature of the united states or its constitution.

Why trust internet banking then?

[MrRTFM]

If this 'internet' is so insecure , why are the big corps. trusting it to transfer billions of dollars around.

I must be missing something - this is technically feasible, they are just doing it the wrong way.

Re:Why trust internet banking then?

[Rufus88]

Because they have a way of verifying after the fact that their transactions occurred as they should, in case they suspect fraud. With internet voting, you can't. In fact, regardless of the voting mechanism, it's important that you not be able to verify that your individual vote was recorded properly, because that would imply being able to prove who you voted for, which would permit vote-selling and make people susceptable to vote-extortion.

Secret ballots?

[Mieckowski]

If any computer can be used to vote, how are the ballots kept secret? If someone's vote is observed (and they might be pressured into this by husband/wife/friend etc...) I can easily see people avoiding voting for controversial canidates, or somebody who their friends oppose.

Interested in putting together a panel in NYC

[Sam Nitzberg]

There are going to be more stories and issues related to Internet voting - here, in the US, and abroad, ranging from small club functions being voted on, through governmental matters from local - to - larger levels...

My concern is that any system be appropriately thought out, formally and precisely defined, using rigidly designed systems (not necessarily off-the-shelf), made to precisely and verifiably conduct voting tansactions, without being able to disclose, leak, or bleed any information that is not supposed to escape the system.

The Johns Hopkins study is an excellent reference and resource on the issues that have to be addressed.

I am personally interested in setting up a panel in New York in Mid-July (not much - just about an hour), but at an interesting venue. I am not offering funding, but there could be some visibility.

I would welcome hearing from anyone who is doing interesting work in this area - in the US or overseas, that would be interested in participating on such a panel, to include related topics on technology-and-democracy.

Sam Nitzberg
sam@iamsam.com
http://www.iamsam.com

Not the voter anonymity problem

[Gorimek]

One fundamental flaw with Internet voting is that there is no way to verify that the voter does not have a gun held to his head while voting, or is subject to some other pressure.

Only by having the voter go in alone in a booth to vote out of sight of everyone else can that be assured.