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Worst Ever Security Flaw in Diebold Voting Machine
WhiteDragon writes "The folks at Open Voting Foundation got their hands on a Diebold AccuVote TS touchscreen voting machine. They took it apart (pictures here), and found the most serious security flaw ever discovered in this machine. A single switch is all that is required to cause the machine to boot an unverified external flash instead of the built-in, verified EEPROM."
You'd think in this day and age we'd have some idea of how to create a secure voting system. Unfortunately it doesn't seem like much of a concern to the politicians. They assume computers are more secure than paper because they don't understand them. Nevermind all the computer scientists warning about the pitfalls of electronic voting. Let's just trust this Diebold sales guy over here! We know he's telling the truth because of the billion dollar contract!
Here's a hint for politicians: If in a population of 300,000,000 only 1,000,000 are capable of understanding how the voting system works, and if only 1,000 people are actually allowed to see how it works, and if there's no verifiable paper trail or any simple and legitimate verification system, then democracy is a farce.
I attribute most of these errors to poor design, not anything intentional. Personally I like the old fashioned lever machines my district uses. It is very hard to hack those, I hear. Unlike computers and paper cards, you never hear bad things spoken about lever voting machines.
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
Electronic voting machines with no paper trail are an insult to democracy. That they come with switches to bypass even the dubious "safeguards" provided is hardly a surprise.
My blog
When will the people wake up? I suspect (some) politicians are well aware of the "flaws" found in the system.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
how will that ever happen WITH these flaws already in place? Diebold machines have been used numerous times already...
I never spellcheck and I freely admit it. Save your karma for more worthwhile "lol erorrs" replies
Any company with devotion to a fair and secure voting system would not make such an obvious oversight. If it was in fact an oversight, it shows that Diebold is far too incompetent to be creating voting machines. You would also think that a company in charge of something so important wouldn't show blatant partisanship either. Why are they still employed?
Similes are like metaphors
I thought the biggest flaw was their certification by states for use in actual elections.
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make install -not war
The AcuuVote machines are what they are, not due to poor design or unintentional mistake. They are the result of a deliberate intent to enable fraud on a massive scale. Viewed from this perspective, the AccuVote design is very good. The real problem comes when Diebold realizes that it needs to become better at obfuscation and makes it harder to detect the fraud.
Sorry, I have never seen the point of these machines. Paper ballots are auditable, user friendly, and if electronics is put into the reporting system, can be counted in a few minutes and submitted. Voting machine are a perfect example of a technology fetish at work. It would make an interesting case study to examine the economic and sociological reasones why we sometimes buy technology that we don't need, don't want and further, serves no useful purpose.
Has anyone answered the question regarding need for automated vote counting in a satisfactory way?
Seems to me that manual counting of votes would be vastly more secure as it would take a huge conspiracy to affect the result either way.
Counting a hundered million votes is hard, counting a thousand votes in a hundered thousand locations is easy.
Wax-Museum Fire Results In Hundreds Of New Danny DeVito Statues
This article is a little high on the hype. The general rule is that if you have physical access to any computer system you can compromize its security.
Don't you think that a flaw that would allow people to vote multiple times or a flaw in the security by which the voting machine uploads results to the central server or flaws in the central server itself are worse than this.
Gee, we have physical access to the guts of a machine and we can do things to it. I'm not terribly impressed.
I don't see how this is the "biggest security flaw ever discovered. Any system will have some method of flashing new code if you have access to the hardware, and while this makes it a little easier, it is not as big of a deal as they make it out to be. After you verify that the system has the correct (independently audited) code loaded into it, you put a tamper-proof sticker on the case, and call it good.
This is nowhere near as bad as the bugs that allowed exploits though the normal user interface, or the fact that the way the votes are stored allows easy tampering by election officials, or the fact that there is no way to recount or verify that the recorded votes are correct.
This is something that can be improved upon, but it isn't a fatal flaw and certainly not one of the main reasons that Diebold machines should be banned.
more aggressive on this issue.
Electronic Voting machines are not a trustworthy technology. They can be made reasonably trustworthy, but only with significant and constant public involvement and oversight. The core element to this happens to be our requirement of anonyminity for our votes. Being unable to link votes to voters means we must then capture the actual votes themselves if we are to be sure the election is just and true.
Roughly 80 percent of Americans will be using these machines in the coming elections. That should scare the tar out of every one of you, regardless of your political bent.
In 2004, this number was about 30 percent and the problems were so great, we really have no assurance our election results actually reflect the will of the American people, whatever that may be.
Think of it this way. Let's say I'm the voting machine counting votes. You tell me what your vote is, and I update my mental count. Can you see that I updated the count correctly? I could report your vote back to you correctly, yet still maintain a different internal count. There is no way to really know is there? That's the problem we face with electronic votes.
The votes are encoded into states stored on devices nobody can directly observe, other than via the proxy of other electronic technology. Essentially, we are voting by proxy when we vote electronically. Without an accounting in the form of a serial voter-verified paper record, or the use of vote storage that is both human and machine readable, we cannot oversee the election results in a manner that brings confidence to the whole affair.
These machines are general purpose computers for the most part. We all know how easily these things are tinkered with because it's what most of us do! Biggest problems are:
-no direct accountability on elections officials to actually hold a just and true election. Technology can and will be blamed for problems, leaving these folks off the hook for failed / unjust elections. Not good. Where the incentive for corruption and manupulation exists, you can bet it's happening. There is too much at stake for it to be otherwise.
-poor understanding of the core technology differences between paper voting and electronic voting. I summarized it above and have a longer, easy to understand, paper here. Mail it to your legislators along with a request for their position on the matter. If you do the mailing, please also do the request. That forces a response, which helps increase the overall perception of the importance of the issue. http://www.opednews.com/dingusDoug_112604_electron ic_voting.htm
Said poor understanding extends to all of us really, legislators and citizens alike. Too many people consider electronic data processing systems as being better than they actually are. Consider this: If they are so infallable, why do ATM machines deliver receipts? Also, be careful about ATM comparisons. The primary difference between an ATM machine and an electronic voting machine lies in the anonymous nature of voting. ATM transactions are keyed to people, electronic voting records are not --thus the need for a voter-verified paper trail.
What do we need to ask for?
Voter verified paper trails that are human readable, serial in nature and easily handled / processed for recounts. Flimsy, thermal rolls that can discolor from improper storage and or handling won't cut it.
Audits at the precinct level. These can catch abnormalities easily and quickly before too much damage is done. Use the paper record to verify issues and act accordingly.
Strong exit polling. Notice how that is being downplayed now? The reason is simple. In 2004, the exit polls did not jive with the voting records, yet we have been exit polling for a good long time. The differences did not appear in this way until the advent of the electronic machines.
Legislation that reinfo
Blogging because I can...
Given taxi meters and electricity meters both have tamper seals, you would have thought that these would have visible tamper seals as well. If in doubt you could even have two tamper seals: one from Diebold and another from the voting commission, in order to ensure that both parties are satisfied with the state of the machine.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
The difference is that with a paper voting system there are a lot of participants. For election fraud you need very many persons to know and participate.
With electronic systems, it is possible to modify something in the sofware with only very few people knowing and participating, and still have influence on the end result.
It is of course much easier to have 3-10 persons work with you, than 10.000
All this has been addressed by the suppliers of Las Vegas casino slot machines. Why not just use them to build the machines?
E Proelio Veritas.
This shouldn't be news to Americans. If you've paid attention to the antics in the last 3 election cycles and the discrepancies between exit polling and actual results, you'd know what's going on. Same thing just happened in Mexico. Expect it to happen here in November. Democrats leading in races by 5% or so, then a miraculous Republican turnout (contradicted by all polls) will maintain their majority. Anyone who protests the results or points out election day shennanigans will be ostracized by the "liberal" media as a whiney sore loser. Welcome to Oceania.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Now, is there a single convincing reason why the simplest, most secure and easily verifiable system - paper ballots - aren't used? Why all the machines? Lever, butterfly ballots, electronic... What problem is it that these systems are meant to solve?
I suspect it is a combination of "We want some result in an hour or two - we are too impatient to wait for it to be counted properly" and "We want a system that we can manipulate without any audit trails."
These are not flaws, this is intentional and is part of the process of how the criminals in the white house got there and are able to stay there. Democracy ended in this country over 6 years ago.
Here's a depressing comparison, showing the rules surrounding slot machines in Vegas vs. voting machines:
Vegas vs. Electronic Voting Machines
I suggest you take a look at the research into the recent Washington state elections done by SoundPolitics.com. They verified close to a 20% error rate in absentee balloting. The signature verification on absentee balloting is no verification at all due to non-verification being done by those who count the ballots. Additionally, the USPS is not a trusted source, they are just another government beuacracy. The ballots themselves cannot necessarly be traced nor verified and even when the signatures are completly different, they are still counted. Due to the nature of voter rolls, duplicate ballots are sent out all the time due to slight variation in a persons name and the duplicate ballots counts are not caught until after the final tally has been done and the election finished. Finally, mischivious gov officials can always delay sending the military their ballots so those serving overseas do not have time to get their vote in on time. This actually happened in 2004 in Washington state.
Permanent absentee is not the solution. Neither is electronic voting.
The true solution takes elements of the recent Mexican election to prevent fraud (voter id cards, thumb inking, precinct based monitoring and tallying) and combine them with the best paper based voting machine.
Your number is a bit low. It's more likely Democracy ended when the people running the country stopped being called "Statesmen" and became "Politicians".
BTW: The mod war on the above post should prove interesting.
I tried every decent and legal way I could think of to resolve the issue w/the business before I rented the chicken suit
1968 Democrats?
If the Democrats rigged the 1968 election, they don't deserve to hold office. Richard Nixon, Republican, won the 1968 election.
"I have as much authority as the pope, I just
don't have as many people who believe it" - George Carlin
I would say that Diebold is competent enough to create a secure voting machine that would take a high level of expertise to spoof. Unfortunately, almost by definition, Diebold would be competent enough to create a spoofable voting machine that could be programmed remotely and capable of 'fixing' elections. The opportunity exists, even if the company, or even renegade employees of the company, don't do it. I will assume that they are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. But I sometimes wonder, because they would be in a perfect position to affect critical elections. Political power can be tempting.
That may be true, but it only protects against vote stuffing, not vote flipping. By vote stuffing, I would include overwriting the database with a new file. Malicious code could contain an algorithm to flip a small percentage of votes while they're being cast. In that case, the total number of votes in the machines will equal the number of voters who signed in with the pollworkers. A VVAT will protect against that though, if the paper receipts are actually audited.
You are correct about process and oversight being more important than any technical vulnerabilities.
The Nevada Gaming Control Board has technical standards for slot machines. They've had enough fraud over the years that they know what has to be done. Some highlights:
(a) Employ a mechanism approved by the chairman which verifies that all control program components, including data and graphic information, are authentic copies of the approved components. The chairman may require tests to verify that components used by Nevada licensees are approved components. The verification mechanism must have an error rate of less than 1 in 10 to the 38th power and must prevent the execution of any control program component if any component is determined to be invalid. Any program component of the verification or initialization mechanism must be stored on a Conventional ROM Device that must be capable of being authenticated using a method approved by the chairman.
(b) Employ a mechanism approved by the chairman which tests unused or unallocated areas of any alterable media for unintended programs or data and tests the structure of the storage media for integrity. The mechanism must prevent further play of the gaming device if unexpected data or structural inconsistencies are found.
(c) Provide a mechanism for keeping a record, in a form approved by the chairman, anytime a control program component is added, removed, or altered on any alterable media. The record must contain a minimum of the last 10 modifications to the media and each record must contain the date and time of the action, identification of the component affected, the reason for the modification and any pertinent validation information.
(d) Provide, as a minimum, a two-stage mechanism for validating all program components on demand via a communication port and protocol approved by the chairman. The first stage of this mechanism must verify all control components. The second stage must be capable of completely authenticating all program components, including graphics and data components in a maximum of 20 minutes. The mechanism for extracting the authentication information must be stored on a Con
Paper trails are just as susceptible to fraud as electronic systems.
Do you actually believe that or are you just playing devils advocate?
The only measure in which that can be accurate is the binary "Is fraud possible?" measure, any measure which takes into account degree of susceptibility, paper is the hands down winner.. Just for starters, we have experience investigating paper trails. There is physical evidence left behind when a paper trail is tampered with. Tampering with the paper trial necessarily require physical access. The list of ways in which paper is demonstrably superior goes on, and on...
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
You seem to have put at least *some* thought into the issue, but I can easily envision scenarios by which the points you made in your post would be effectively irrelevant. I will present one such scenario, briefly, here.
First of all, I would would like to say, as an aside, that the United States of America is not, and has never been, a "democracy". It is, in fact, a federal republic. Although this idea may seem to many to somewhat irrelevant to the topic of election fraud, it is relevant in that the federal system, in and of itself, provides easy paths to successful tampering of election results, particularly for the Republican/Conservative faction. The fact that the country has long been divided between relatively conservative rural districts/states, and relatively liberal urban areas is a side effect of the federal system that reinforces this possibility. Also of note is the electoral college, which ensures vastly greater proportional representation for those rural constituencies.
The mechanism I will describe *could* be used by either Party, but the real makeup of the country makes this mechanism far more effective in practice for the GOP.
Now, your assertion that election results, if tampered with, would need to effective mirror the actual voter turnout is not particularly relevant. The actual total number of votes cast is not in question--what *is* in question is the content of the individual votes, themselves.
Say, for example, I was a Republican sympathizer in the last two US Presidential elections, and I had a desire to attempt to tamper with the reported results in order to ensure victory for my Party. What I would do is not to attempt to disenfranchise liberal/Democratic voters in urban areas, but boost the tabulation of conservative/Republican votes in rural districts. Remember that by changing one vote, the effect in the tabulation is effectively doubled, assuming the total number of votes cast does not change. It is highly likely that in a district that has traditionally heavily favored Republican candidates, a slight reduction of Democratic votes and corresponding slight increase in Republican votes will go entirely unnoticed, especially in an environment where extreme partisanism has resulted in somewhat increased turnout for the Republican faction.
Given that there are many more rural conservative districts than liberal urban districts, such a slight change would be compounded by that number of districts where it would be possible to effect that change such that the overall results for any particular state could be changed dramatically. This mechanism would also be most effective in states such as Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida, where the balance, in terms of overall numbers of voters on either side of the aisle is close. Such an effect could easily swing one of these states to one side or the other. Although Ohio received the bulk of the scrutiny in the 2004 election, it is worth mentioning that Pennsylvania was decided by a smaller margin than Ohio.
The election machines used thus far have no *voter verifiable* paper trail, even, as far as I have been able to determine, the TSx series. A paper trail seems to be kept with these machines, but as it is not voter verifiable, it is as easily modified as the results stored in memory. Again, the actual number of changed votes in any particular district could and probably would, be statistically small in relation to the overall number of votes cast.
Even an incompetent programmer would have no trouble writing a routine to accomplish such an end, and the only point of intrusion required is before the point of delivery of the machines to the local election commission. Of course, as we have seen in past elections, the possible points of intrusion are many and varied.
I do agree with you, however, that it is the process that is mostly at fault, rather than the individual technologies.
No, it ended when only a minority of citizens bothered to register to vote, and only a minority of those actually bother to vote.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
I'm a little mystified by the common belief that more idiots voting will fix anything. The problem isn't a low voter turnout: it's a low incidence of self-education about politics, and a low incidence of the ability to reason clearly, that is the problem with the US electorate.
Unfetter your ideas. Copyfree your mind.
But this bunch has taken it to entirely new levels --- and again, the US Constitution states that a close election will be decided by the House of Representatives, while the Supreme Court did decide the 2000 election in a most unconstitutional manner.
He said that exit polling data should not be significantly different. There is a whole discipline in mathematics called 'statistics' that deal quite a lot with this thing called 'significance'. You can calculate how big the difference can get until it gets extremely unlikely that it occurred by chance.
The follow-up line there is equally excellent:
Opus: Lord knows we need more statesmen...
ATM's have had years to go through many iterations to get to a "secure" and "reliable" system (that even then can have anomolies)?
It's because if your ATM isn't secure, nobody will buy it, because they won't want to lose their money. If your voting machine isn't secure, the state government will buy it anyway.
paintball
I'd be flabbergasted if there hadn't already been. Until real fraud in a real election is detected and proven, nothing is likely to change.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
I am a software engineer on emebedded systems. I see a lot of boards like this.
The ability to boot from different sources is a normal debugging feature, not in itself sinister. Should they have cleaned that up on the production model? Yeah, sure. But verifiability is ultimately a human concern anyway, not a tech one.
It all comes down to who you trust.
If you don't trust the polling place, make the voting machine tamper proof.
But then you have to trust the guy who built the voting machine.
You have to trust the guy who loaded the software on it at the factory or the elections office.
You have to trust the guy who wrote the code. Even if you inspected the code, you have to trust him to give you a binary based on that and not pull a fast one.
You have to trust his compiler to give him a binary without compiled in back doors.
I feel like I probably haven't listed all the points where this voting machine chain of trust can break down.
On top of all that, voting machines are not cost effective vs hand counted paper ballots. So, I advocate for no voting machines.
Start Running Better Polls