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Vote Tabulator Security Hole Exposed
Doc Ruby writes "Black Box Voting has exposed a security hole in Diebold machines that tabulate votes collected from electronic voting machines. A code entered into the tabulator's user interface duplicates the "secure" counts into an insecure count which can be changed, and counted instead. The "double books" vulnerability and exploit were reported to the manufacturer over a year ago, and confirmed, while major customers (California and Washington states) were notified shortly thereafter. In spite of some revisions, the latest version of the software remains insecure. Diebold voting machines running GEMS version 1.18.x are vulnerable, running in about three dozen states. Although the software is widely deployed, and scheduled for use in shortly upcoming elections, risk mitigations are available, mostly protocols restricting physical or network access to the machines. Other auditing/accountability measures for ensuring only trusted access to the system are recommended."
For all the banter that goes on here, we all know how this is going to turn out. Everybody bitches and moans about it, and the mainstream press runs toned down stories. In the mean time, people who know what's going on continue to look like crazy conspiracy theorists. End result: The public won't know or won't care until a massive mistake is uncovered after the person enters office and everyone realizes that they've been living under the authority of a false representative. Of course, that's provided said person doesn't pass a law to protect people in his situation once they're discovered.
Let me know when a candidate named "Diebold Sucks" wins 15% of the popular vote.
Technology is a wonderful thing.
But come on. Are we so ADHD in this country we can't vote on paper and wait for real people to count them? Yes, there will be mistakes... but at least if a recount is needed, there's a paper trail.
If you don't have time to do it right, when will you have time (or in this case, an opportunity) to do it over?
Can it be? A free PC!?
Is anyone else suprised by how bad diebold's coders are? I mean seriously. I know microsoft can't make their products secure, but they have millions of lines of legacy code and compatability issues. This isn't an excuse, but building a secure system from the ground up should be pretty straight forward, honestly.
Security should have been the top priority the whole way through, but apperantly it wasn't. Pretty amazing, IMO.
And wtf, they can't fix a bug in a year? They're not going to have it fixed by Nov? Jesus, what is it with these people.
Also, this is kind of boring. Anyone involved in the RNC convention or the protests around here?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
So let me understand. Entirely by accident, if you enter a specific code at the machine, a transparent and highly successful process takes the existing collected data and makes a duplicate of that data which can be altered and fed into the combining and counting process.
Someone must have REALLY misspelled an important constant, no? I mean, what are the odds? When I screw up, the code usually just fails to compile or takes out the vm. Someone needs to find the guy who "accidentally" did that and get him to buy lottery tickets for all of us.
wow.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
Once "QA" (or what passed for it) was complete, either they forgot to remove the code, or they thought it might be a useful monitoring/debugging tool in the field.
Normal coders would wrap any such test-only code in #ifdefs, so that it wasn't active for normal use. But these aren't normal coders, so we can't assume that.
However, it is entirely on-par with people like Cisco shipping routers with a trivial password for the technicians.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Back in 2002, Miami-Dade had an election using touch-screen voting. In some circumstances there were more votes than registered voters, and in at least one instance an entire day's votes in one machine were "accidentally" erased. No paper backup means the votes were lost in the ether.
Since each state is responsible for operating the voting process, you'd think that Jeb Bush (the Governor) and former Orlando Mayor and now Secretary of State Glenda Hood would have been outraged. Jeb's reply was "why can't Democrats learn how to vote?". Glenda Hood's response was "that doesn't mean that we need to have a paper trail." She has this big bug up her ass that printed receipts would cause a repeat of the 2000 debacle when in reality the 2000 debacle was 100% caused by the old punch cards being difficult to scan. A paper printout would simply be a way to recount votes that aren't up to speculation by the person doing the recount (i.e. they know exactly which votes are cast.)
P.S. Diebold Sucks!
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There's a fine line between cuddling and holding someone down so they can't get away.
While a lot of people will say that screaming about insecure voting machines is a bunch of FUD, I think there is a legitimate reason to be far more scared of insecurities in digital voting than in the traditional kind. The nice thing about paper/punchcards/crayon is that the scale of fraud is limited by the physical nature of the medium. It's tough to dispose of a lot of votes without anyone noticing a precinct is missing, and it's difficult to make much of a differece forging individual ballots. The problem with electronic voting is that like every other industry that's gone digital (accounting to spreadsheets for example), the scale and efficiency of mundane tasks is amplified by many orders of magnitude. It's tough to make much of a dent in an election by registering under ten names and voting ten times. It's easy (if you have an exploit) to to click once to change 10,000 votes in a manner that looks utterly plausible. So for all the talk of just giving red meat to the media to have another thing to panic about, I'd say why the heck can't we force Florida to print paper reciepts?
I asked this before and am going to ask again.
Why do we insist on using voting computers which are reprogrammable. These are all Von Neumann architecture machines. As computer scientists we should be able to find a more appropriate architecture for voting. Something where the code is not alterable, something where the counts are not chanegable.
Think about it. And if you dont understand the question then learn about computing architecture. There are computers other than the multi purpose kind. They tend to be single purpose and far more efficient at their designed jobs.
Diebold has a huge investment in this and sees dollar signs well into the future if their machines become the standard. Just think about how long the mechanical machines have been around. Diebold wants that kind of longevity for their product.
I am not against a company making money, far from it. However, making your money off the most important process in America cannnot be ethically supported. I left telling the Diebold guy that I enjoyed toying with him. He was left with a chagrinned look on his face, knowing that the road ahead is gonna be tough.
I was not willing to return and pay another entrance fee to bring materials back to prove this guy wrong so do me a favor- if you are planning on going to the MD State Fair, take along some materials to back up your arugment and take some potshots at the Diebold guys.
Lets see, a company whos leader claims to want to reform the US as a theocracy and has sworn to give the ellection to George Bush has a product used for e-voting that has a "feature" (sorry, this is not a bug) that allows someone to rig an election. Gee, I have no idea why anyone whould think this was anything negative.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
"I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." --Walden O'Dell, CEO Diebold Inc.
Untwist your knickers. If he had said something about helping to "defeat Bush" or whetever, it would all be an evil left-wing conspiracy instead.
0 1 - just my two bits
Don't tell anyone we have endemic corruption in the US political system! They might start gettting ideas and, gasp, start voting for other parties, or worse, get off their ass and really try to make some changes.
Shit, I'm an Anarchist, I'm for world revolution and all that, but at this point I'd be pretty fucking content with a government that doesn't put its citizens in what amount to concentration camps for smoking a fucking doobie. I mean come on!
What I really don't get is why so much of the right wing supports all the roll backs in civil liberties. Do you remember the clinton years? Ruby Ridge and other incidents should worry the hell out of you because there will be another Democratic Administration sometime, even if it isn't '04.
A blog about stuff.
It has been discovered that Paper(tm), a voting system planned to be widely deployed in the coming elections, suffers from numerous vulnerabilities.
A security assessment taskforce has found that the system, in which a stylus is used to infuse chemical dyes onto a thin cellulose-based wafer, is vulnerable to a Denial Of Service attack in which the wafer is exposed to heat until fully oxidised. This renders the results unreadable. Furthermore, the wafers are unencrypted, which makes them vulnerable to replay and other man-in-the-middle attacks. Another attack involves exposing the wafers to lateral force until they are compressed, rendering them easier to dispose. This is known as the 'scrunch-it-and-trash-it' attack, which was made famous in the underground hacker classic Election, starring Matthew Broderick and Reese Witherspoon.
Members of the security community are said to be flabbergasted at the general level of public apathy towards these vulnerabilities, which the taskforce has given its highest threat rating.
A huge scandal is exactly what this Diebold fiasco needs, and nothing is going to happen until it does. Every ambitious local journo in the country should be assiduously courting sources in the local elections offices. Eventually someone will Watergate it. That's the only way it's going to change.
I know this because I was once an investigative journalist. You would happen upon a story that seemed so shocking it was unbelievable, and when you asked around, everyone involved would say "Oh, yeah, that's right, everyone knows about that".
In one case (abuse at a psychiatric hospital) there were 600 documented allegations of abuse which had been investigated. Not one had been upheld, because the evidence of psychiatric patients was held to be unreliable. When we exposed it, it became national headline news for several days and resulted in year long government inquiry and, finally, change.
But everyone already knew about it.
Diebold is going to blow up horribly and sad to say the sooner it does the better. People are not interested in potential vulnerabilities, only post-facto scandals.
I'm not wrong. You haven't thought about it hard enough.
"Perhaps it's just a coincidence that the sudden rise of inaccurate exit polls happened around the same time corporate-programmed, computer-controlled, modem-capable voting machines began recording and tabulating ballots..."
Unfortunately "...if any of [it] is true, there's not much of a paper trail from the voters' hand to prove it..."
"Back when Hagel first ran there for the U.S. Senate in 1996, his company's computer-controlled voting machines showed he'd won stunning upsets in both the primaries and the general election. The Washington Post (1/13/1997) said Hagel's "Senate victory against an incumbent Democratic governor was the major Republican upset in the November election." According to Bev Harris of www.blackboxvoting.com, Hagel won virtually every demographic group, including many largely Black communities that had never before voted Republican. Hagel was the first Republican in 24 years to win a Senate seat in Nebraska."
"Six years later Hagel ran again, this time against Democrat Charlie Matulka in 2002, and won in a landslide. As his hagel.senate.gov website says, Hagel "was re-elected to his second term in the United States Senate on November 5, 2002 with 83% of the vote. That represents the biggest political victory in the history of Nebraska."
"What Hagel's website fails to disclose is that about 80 percent of those votes were counted by computer-controlled voting machines put in place by the company affiliated with Hagel. Built by that company. Programmed by that company...."
If anyone wants to watch a really good documentary about the 2000 election, and the security of the 2004 election. I recommend a documentary called "Ballot Battles" on the Discovery Times Channel.
In part of this documentary. a woman who is against electronic voting machines (who isn't a computer expert) was googling a manufacturer of electronic voting machines, and she stumbled apon all the firmware and source code to all their voting machines, she downloaded it, and filled 7 CD's and brought it to a computer security expert, and they were shocked about the poor coding of the voting machines operating system. With this information, she was able to easily hack the voting machine, and was able to teach an 8 year old to do it too.
it's a really good documentary, check it out.
unfortunatly, i don't know when it will air again, i just checked the TV schedule and didn't see it anywhere.
You can't test a program or system of any complexity with some code in, pronounce it "good", and then take out some of the code.
Its new code at that point. Which is perhaps why its left in. If they take it out, then they have to re-test and re-certify.
But fundamentally, it shows that Diebold is, at best, incapable of understanding what it takes to produce this kind of code. It sounds like a bunch of junior programmers coding under the "direction" of a mid-level programmer.
What I'm surprised at is the local government accepted binaries from the vendor without (a) having full access to the source code (b) a mechnism to ensure the source code they audit matches the binaries in the machine.
When you think about it, the whole thing reeks of a company looking to make a quick buck and local governments too stupid to understand that they lack the expertise to judge this kind of software and make an intelligent decision about deploying it.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
The worst are full of passionate intensity
And the best lack all conviction...
But I suspect that that is always true - the best are by their nature capable of empathising with people on both sides of a question, and capable of seeing the logic on both sides. Hence they find it hard to be passionate.
True passion, I fear, probably comes from ignorance stoked by fear and testosterone.
Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything. - Stalin
Why? Because the loser has to concede to the fact that he has lost. We do not force the loser to lose, the loser allows the winner to win. "I lost in a fair fight. Better luck next time." The concession speech is just as important to democracy as the acceptance speech.
If a loser of an election disputes the results and the winner cannot defend the vote count, then the loser has every right to appeal to other means--in most countries, violence.
In the last American election, the loser disputed the vote count. The winner could not defend the results, so the loser appealed to other means--the Supreme Court.
The fact that there was no outbreak of violence (at least of any significance) was not due to the voters' acceptance of the count. It was due to the voter's acceptance of the Supreme Court as the final word in American government. The loser accepted the Supreme Court decision and allowed the winner to win. The voters (some begrudgingly) accepted the decision.
But please note: the last disputed election had something that the next one will not: chads--a paper trail--transparency. Win or lose, everyone had the hope that eventually, the truth would be known. It may take days, weeks or months to determine, but the truth would be known. The system would work.
Ignore conspiracy theories. Ignore corporate donors. Ignore programming loopholes. The threat of the next disputed election is the notion that even if the election is honest, even if every vote is counted, even if the outcome truly matches the intent of the voters, the loser will be able to dispute the outcome and the winner will not be able to defend it.
Imagine the turmoil if after the last election, over a million of the punch ballots had gone missing. That is what these systems offer. It does not matter who wins this fall. The loser will dispute the result and the winner will not be able to defend it.
As counter-intuitive as it may seem, Bush may be the most likely candidate to suffer from the paper-less voting system. If Kerry wins, I do not believe Bush will have much of a case for vote tampering as the systems are being used primarily in districts controlled by Republican party members. If Bush wins, it is very likely that the results would be thrown out altogether for the sake of another election. The anger pent up by Democrats in the last election fraught with claims of 'unfair' would be mild in comparison to an election that lead to charges of treasonous fraud. Nixon was impeached for election tampering and all he did was spy on his opponents.
Many comments have offered ways to counter the threat of the new systems and most them are good. Yes, it is helpful to point out the possibility of fraud. Yes, it is helpful to write/call representatives demanding change. Yes, it is helpful to create more transparent technical solutions (yes, open source is one option, but not the only one). In the meantime, the best way to ensure that 1.) your vote is counted, 2.) your vote can be recounted, 3.) your vote will not be disputed is to ask, NOW, for your absentee ballot. It is exactly the reason that both the Republican and Democratic Parties have started a "get out the absentee vote" campaign in areas where the new systems are being installed.
If the Supreme Court does not ask for a recount, they may look to the absentee ballot as the measure of voter intent. The next President may be elected by the voters that do not even show up.