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Critical Security Hole Found in Diebold Machines
ckswift writes "From security expert Bruce Schneier's blog, a major security hole has been found in Diebold voting machines." From the article: "The hole is considered more worrisome than most security problems discovered on modern voting machines, such as weak encryption, easily pickable locks and use of the same, weak password nationwide. Armed with a little basic knowledge of Diebold voting systems and a standard component available at any computer store, someone with a minute or two of access to a Diebold touch screen could load virtually any software into the machine and disable it, redistribute votes or alter its performance in myriad ways."
Well, this seems very insecure to me. BBV criticizes the three layer architecture and states that it would be very easy to target it three different ways (at each layer):
The article talks about a "standard tool you can buy at any computer store" and I believe this is referring to a PCMCIA card (what you use in laptops). I guess these are used to boot, upgrade & ready the machines for use. They do not go into detail but I wager that using a PCMCIA card with a USB port on it, you could load your own data from a thumb/pen drive. This would be small and easy to carry in. If you had access to it outside of the voting window, you could potentially use a PCMCIA card that functions as a NIC (probably with RJ45 cable port) to use cross over cable and a laptop for a 'live' attack.
My work here is dung.
Considering that Walden O'Dell, chief executive of Diebold Inc., was quoted in August of 2003 as saying that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year", this shouldn't be too surprising.
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
So the closed-source company with apparent links to the incumbent government and a record of blocking any attempts to investigate their code turn out to have security flaws?
Okay - closed-source versus open-source is a non-issue, but I expected something like this from Diebold sooner or later.
I'm seriously worried though. Here in Australia a lot of ATMs have been replaced recently with shiny new Diebold machines. I've no doubt they're harder to hack, but it's not an encouraging sign.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
Diebold can make a box that handles your money with no issues. They make a voting machine that is atrocious and faulty. Goes to show where priorities lie across the board.
Installing "Goatse.cx Screensaver", please wait...
- chrish
A Finnish computer expert working with Black Box Voting, a nonprofit organization critical of electronic voting, found the security hole in March after Emery County, Utah, was forced by state officials to accept Diebold touch screens, and a local elections official let the expert examine the machines.
Black Box Voting was to issue two reports today on the security hole, one of limited distribution that explains the vulnerability fully and one for public release that withholds key technical details.
The computer expert, Harri Hursti, quietly sent word of the vulnerability in March to several computer scientists who advise various states on voting systems. At least two of those scientists verified some or all of Hursti's findings. Several notified their states and requested meetings with Diebold to understand the problem.
Oh, those plucky Finns and the trouble they cause...
Does anybody get the idea that Diebold simply threw these machines together, cobbled the code together from stuff lying around the shop, slapped some paint on them, and expected states to use them no questions asked? You would think somewhere along the line, someone would have stood up at a development meeting and said, "we'd better make sure these things are secure."
Diebold will of course now hem, haw, blame others, attack the media and anti-electronic voting groups, and reluctantly fix the problem. Just in time for the next one to crop up. Do they have any competition in this market? I don't hear a lot about other companies creating voting machines -- either there aren't any or they do a lot better job.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
That's right. We've seen this before.
Turns out Diebold has a strong interest in keeping their security systems proprietary.
As the article you quoted states: And as USA Today reported:
My work here is dung.
What's so bad about the optical scanners and the ballots where you fill in a circle? I remember a study that showed they were the most secure, you have a paper trail, and any idiot can figure it out after 13 years of standardized testing. Electronic voting, on the other hand, smacks of boodoggle, fraud & overall shoddiness.
Why does Diebold design these machines in such a way that they *CAN* be hacked? I think that involving an Operating System and software in the design of such a machine is a critical error. As a computer engineer, I realize that overcomplicating things can lead to errors. DSP's can make hardware extremely cheap, but there are places where analog circuits are cheaper and more realiable! Why hasn't Diebold designed a hardwired electronic circuit or a mechanical system with failsafes such that the machine can't be hacked, and the wrong candidate will not be selected if the machine fails? There are so many places where their current design can and will go wrong. I believe that it's time for these loonies (or preferrably someone else who has more sense) to come up with a more rudimentary and failsafe design!
How come no political party makes this a central campaign argument ?
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Jeez...what's everyone so paranoid about? How could a hacker possibly get access to a voting machine for a minute or two with enough privacy to load malicious software? He'd need to find one that for some reason or another had a curtain around it and hope no one thinks it's suspicious that he'd be in there alone with the machine.
Come on. Tell us something we didn't know.
OK. OLN has hired a man named Stanley Cup to promote the NHL playoffs this year.
>> "What would the robut do? Frame someone!"
It's pointless talking about securing something that's inherently a terrible idea. You can't have voting performed by something that is, for most people, magical.
A good way to be certain these machines are sending the correct votes is to have a paper trail. When a person votes, a transaction id and their vote are printed to a piece of card or something, which is then put in a ballot box.
To verify that no votes have been sent by the machine without interaction, a random set of votes is selected from the result the machine sent and these are checked against the paper votes. To check that all votes have been sent correctly, a random set of paper votes are checked against the records sent by the machine. If either of these doesn't correlate, the paper votes are always assumed to be correct.
Even if this were to happen, it would (probably) take almost as much effort as counting the votes by hand!
Suppose DieBOLD's ATM machines had a backdoor key sequence that would enable me to get the whole stack of 20's. How long would it take them to slam that door shut?
When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.
A little searching here on /. and Google will remind people how these kinds of issues have come up with Diebold Touch Screen Voting Machines before. I have to wonder why they, in particluar, seem to have more problems than other voting maching manufacturers? (no sarcasm intended).
Most of the articles I have read, including this one, point to the fact that it can only be done by someone who knows how the system works and has the correct tools, lending some politicos (including Diebold reps) to say that they really aren't that vulnerable at all or that the problem is not serious. But stakeholders in elections results are precisely the people who could have someone in-the-know and with the correct tools manipulate the results just enough to tip the scales in one candidates favor or another. California realized this and dumped Diebold. Close elections happen all the time, so possible (even plausible) scenarios are not to hard to imagine. If a Diebold machine can be rerogrammed or altered for voting results, even the "verifiable paper trail" could be made to print out alternative results (for those who don't bother to look at the print-out window).
As an Ohio voter who has used one of these machines, I think I am going to have to vote absentee from now on, since a newly passed Ohio law permits me to do so far any reason at all (e.g. I dont want to vote on a vulnerable touch screen machine).
For me, this is one more poignient example of how proprietary voting technology leaves room for problems and the need for transparency with it by proper (preferably Federal) legislation.
uR iGn0ranc3, Their Power
---sung to the tune of Woody Guthrie's Hard Travelling
D
Diebold's stealing elections, I thought you knowed.
Diebold's stealing elections
A7
on machines with closed source code.
D
We dont need no double dealing,
G
electronic vote stealing.
A7
Diebold's stealing elections,
D
Lord.
Diebold's stealing our votes, the right that makes us free.
Diebold's stealing our votes, oh cant you see.
How can they say I'm free if their machines can vote for me?
Diebold's stealing our votes, Lord.
Diebold's stealing our votes, I thoought you knowed.
They've been shredding the paper trail at the end of the road.
It doesn't matter who you choose, when you're sure you're gonna lose.
Diebold's stealing our votes, Lord.
I'm gonna vote with pen and paper I thought you knowed.
I'm gonna see it counted at the end of the road.
I'm gonna vote with pen and paper so I know that there's a record.
And I'm gonna go vote my conscience Lord.
A quick couple of notes (so to speak)...
The chords are right as far as I know. The words are mine, though they dont fit quite right in all the places. Either apply Tom Leherer's rule that "it doesnt even matter if you fit a few extra syllables into a line" or use the folk process to make it fit so you can sing it.
Also, I've got one line with no verse to put around it...
"Voting wont be so scary if the countings not binary"
The main thrust of this song is to educate and protest on the issue of electronic voting. I am a New York State resident and for those who dont know we are being sued by the feds to upgrade our nice mechanical voting machines to electronic voting. If we do not they are going to withhold federal money for the upkeep of our voting system. This is blackmail, the same kind of blackmail that was used to put the 55 mph speed limit in place.
Our voting machines have worked for a century with the same design. We trust them to do the job and know where the flaws and weak spots in the security are. We, as a group, when polled, do not show a desire to change the system at this point and our state voting commission and legeslative review boards have rejected electronic voting as an unsecure and immature technology. The peculiarities of how a state does it's voting is a state's right to decide, which is why different states have different rules about every aspect of the electoral process. Some states are proportional, some are by district. Some states use machines and others use punchcards. Election laws are made at the local level.
The lawsuit by the federal government smacks of blackmail and manipulation. Why is the federal gov trying to control the electoral process at the local level? What do they hope to gain?
I've questioned why we don't do something like this, and have the reading done by OCR.
To reduce errors you'd have to have a few rules: first, no corrections. If you fuck up, new ballot for you. (I'd prefer if you fuck up, no vote for you, but I'm guessing that won't fly.) Second, the marks have to be very distinct. That's why I'd use bingo blotters. They're like really huge magic markers that basically soak through the paper. Every old fart knows how to use one, and you could make them have to color in a fairly substantial area (like a square inch or larger) so that they can't just accidentally touch the blotter to the paper. Important elections (Presidential, Governor, etc.) go on rather largish sheets of paper, and each candidate gets a big area, with dead space in between the marking areas for each candidate equal to 5x the diameter of the marking area. So even if you're a real retard and don't color inside the lines, you've still got a lot of ways to go before you get over to the next candidate's box.
Also, there would be a test box. Just a blank box in the corner that you'd fill out, in order to make sure your marker was working and that you had the hang of things. Also, it gives the reader (human or machine) a comparison point to see what their actual marks will probably look like. (E.g. "Oh, this idiot only likes to circle the box, instead of filling it in; that's why the machine didn't read it.")
Perhaps most importantly, the indicative boxes that you mark are not placed symmetrically on the page. That is, they are placed so that they're not the same distance from the top as they are to the bottom, or from the left as on the right. This is important, since it means you can read the ballot electronically without having to orient them in one way or the other, just by measuring the distance from the mark to the edges of the sheet.
Then, use a dye in the blotters that's UV-reflective (or UV absorbent). That way they're very distinctive and easy to read through a scanning system. I'm pretty sure any pigment based marker/blotter would work here. These systems are already in existence -- the postal service uses them for automatically canceling stamps on letters (stamps are UV reflective). But the point is you can OCR them by just looking at the position on the page of the marks, you don't need punchcard-style index corners (although we'd have those too, for extra security).
I think the other thing that would help is if you gave the election officials more time between voting day and when they were expected to certify the results. Like two weeks, at a minimum. There's really no reason people should be rushing with this. Back the election up a little ways if need be, but the idea that the polls should close at 8pm and the results should be certified by 10pm is crap, and it can only lead to bad things happening ("oops! Look at this, we forgot a box of ballots! Oh, well, too late now!"). Elections are too important to rush through.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
The more local the election boards, the less likely that a wide-spread, concerted, and coordinated effort to perpetrate voter fraud can occur. When the original post states that "government" is whom we should be protecting this from, I'm sure the meaning of government is closer to central government than local government. There is an important distinction -- and I don't think it's "anti-government Slashdot pandering" to say so.
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.