The Diebold Voting-Machine Hack

Warm John writes to mention a short article on Doctor Dobbs Journal about the Hack that couldn't be done. "Hacking a Diebold voting machine was the focus of Cigital's Gary McGraw's keynote at SD Best Practices. He discussed 'Security Analysis of the Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting Machine,' a paper released by Edward Felten, Ari Feldman, and Alex Halderman of the Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy. 'The paper details a simple method whereby the Princeton team was able to compromise the physical security of a Diebold voting machine, infecting it with a virus that could change voting results and spread by memory-card to other machines of the same type.'"

Comments

Money more important than a fair vote?

[ronkronk]

Man Diebold looks slimier and slimier every passing week, but I'm more disturbed by Joe Demma's, Salt Lake's chief elections officer, response to Bruce Funk's actions. Granted, Funk acted by going around Demma by calling in Black Box Voting to check the Diebold machines, when presumably Demma is supposed to be responsible for that (just my guess as he's the chief elections officer).

However, Demma seems more incensed at Funk because he may cost the state $40,000 for Diebold's astronomical recertification fee. He doesn't seem to be worried that people might not trust these machines. He doesn't seem to care that a state officer was worried enough to call in a non-profit third party to verify the integrity of these machines. I mean, these things could possibly affect the outcome of a vote, the foundation for a democratic republic! But instead of worrying about these machines he's clearly more upset about the $40,000 and Funk not talking to him about his concerns regarding the voting machines.

And of COURSE Diebold is going to tell you the machines are fine and fair. Sheesh, they want to make money don't they?

Isn't it great that chief elections officers have their priorities straight?

Give me a ballot sheet and a pencil any day over these closed, proprietary black box machines.

Re:Money more important than a fair vote?

[partisanX]

Nobody in their right mind who cares about the stability of our democratic republic could condone a continuation of these scandals. If we can't trust the vote, then we can't trust anything about the government, and when enough people feel that way in a democratic republic, bad things happen.

Re:Money more important than a fair vote?

[dgatwood]

Nobody in their right mind who understands what's going on can condone the existence of closed-source software in the vote counting or vote taking process at all, whether by Diebold or otherwise.

If elections officials told the public, "We're going to count by a secret counting method and we won't tell you how we're going to count; you'll just have to trust us that we picked the right person for the job," the public would burn down city hall. Unfortunately, the public hasn't yet realized that this is exactly what is happening....

Anybody want to raise money for a front page ad in the NY Times? Maybe with a little extra money left over to donate to local fire departments? :-)

Re:Money more important than a fair vote?

[partisanX]

Golly, do you people lack reading comprehension or just critical thinking skills?

Funny, I didn't get the feeling the poster mentioned closed source so much to advocate open source software, as to draw the clear paralell between that and a secret ballot counting method implementation. Let me re-read... Yep, he didn't mention using Open Source at all, he mentioned closed source and then followed it with the very valid, extremely painfully obvious paralell between that and a secret ballot counting procedure.

Do you see that now or is there a problem with YOUR reading comprehension or critical thinking skills?

Re:Money more important than a fair vote?

[symbolic]

However, Demma seems more incensed at Funk because he may cost the state $40,000 for Diebold's astronomical recertification fee.

Huh? Diebold is certifying its own machines? To say that this is like the fox guarding the henhouse would be a gross oversimplification...it's more like the fox has control of a large percentage of the henhouses throughout the country, and is working diligently to ensure this does not change.

Who would want to tamper? Terrorists

[FerretFrottage]

Sure hackers would be tempted as well, but look at it from a major terrorist network perspective. If they were able to alter the election outcome and prove it (or have it proven), think about the doubt this would cast in all future elections (and possibliy cast doubt on past ones as well if the same tech was used)...and not just for Americans, but world wide. "One man, one vote"....I could see the terrorists laughing as they played video of them voting of a candidate 1 million times or taking down the voting "network" entirely. They wouldn't even need to injure/kill anybody in the process and they would be able to make a major statement.

Re:Soo..

[fishbowl]

You are assuming that the person in charge of contracting Diebold for voting machines actually *wants* tamperproof, accountable systems.

The video is excellent

[bsandersen]

I have just finished watching the video on the Princeton site and I must say it is very well done. Any reasonably motivated alert person who watches this video will see the problem we're trying to highlight.

It isn't enough for computer software professionals to discover problems like this; we need to be able to communicate our results effectively to the non-technical public. Too often we find something disturbing and decend into technical jargon and lose our audience. The Princeton team has done an excellent job avoiding that pitfall and communicating this threat.

Now, if only we could find a reasonably motivated and alert politician to actually act on this.

Re:The box was not production hardware...

[dgatwood]

It does make a difference. With a punch card, or a paper ballot, or even a mechanical voting both anyone can trace when fraud has occured. And in those cases we implement some security, track where the fraud came from (if we can) and redo the election.

Except that they won't. There have been numerous cases recently in which problems were confirmed beyond any doubt. In every case, even when the number of dubious votes would have been enough to potentially change the results of the election, the courts let the election results stand, and no reelections were called.

We don't need to be able to prove that fraud occurred. We need to be able to eradicate it. The only way that is even remotely possible is if the voting process is transparent. This means:

• Every piece of software installed on the voting machines from the driver layer all the way up to the GUI must be open source and subject to public inspection.
• Any changes to the code must be subjected to a thorough audit before they can be deployed.
• Every single security bug reported that can be reproduced MUST be fixed prior to the date of deployment.
• Every single security bug must be public knowledge.
• The hardware must be commodity hardware underneath so that average citizens can test the software on their own systems.
• The hardware must have additional physical security measures built into the case design.
• The hardware must be under lock and key in a secure storage container from the moment that it has been certified up until the day of the election.
• The usual security measures from there forward should probably be sufficient.

Diebold just needs an incentive ....

[RallyDriver]

Compromising Diebold machines seems to be a regular method of swinging elections in Florida ( UC Berkeley )

The white hat community needs to start undermining vulnerable e-voting technologies whenever and wherever possible. Just put a few Democrats into office in the bible belt.

The CEO of Diebold is on record as a dyed in the wool Republican: "Our job is to deliver the election to George W Bush". Problematic for a vendor with so much trust. But once their machines start swinging votes for the other side, they'll soon start adding security.