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Dutch Blackbox Voting Pwned
An anonymous reader writes, "In a just-published report (PDF, in English, cached here), the Dutch we-don't-trust-voting-computers foundation (Dutch and English) details how it converted a Nedap voting machine, of a type used in Holland and France, to steal a pre-determined percentage of votes and reassign them to another party. The paper describes in great detail how 'anyone, when given brief access to the devices at any time before the election, can gain complete and virtually undetectable control over the election results.' As a funny bonus, responding to an earlier challenge by the manufacturer, the researchers reflashed a voting machine to play chess. The news was on national television (Dutch) last night and is growing into a major scandal. 90% of the votes in the Netherlands are cast on these machines and national elections will be held in a month." Please create mirrors for the 8.1-MB PDF and post their URLs. You might also try John Graham-Cumming's l8r.org service to tell you when the slashdot effect subsides from any of the mirrors.
I would first like to say that I admire your diligence in this matter and gratefully appreciate the work and effort you have put forth to protect the votes of many people the world over including my own.
Secondly, I would like to point out that, although you are a group of experts/scientists, I have witnessed concerns based on science go unheeded by politics--at least in the United States. I hope it is different in other countries, but I have seen a large organization of scientists from all walks of life oppose some of the current administration's actions here with little or no effect on the populace.
Whether this is because people still view scientists as nerds or outcasts of society, I cannot comment on. I only want to make it known--at least on Slashdot--that I support what you're doing and am amazed at the work contained in this PDF. I am more so amazed that someone was kind enough to take the time to translate it to English.
I hope your efforts are met with international recognition as being a champion of voting security--although I fear the reality is you may be criticized and possibly even sued.
My favorite criticism listed in the PDF: After reading a bit of the PDF, I must say that the only thing I don't like is that there is no clear solution offered aside from allusions to opening up the process and technology on how all of this works so that it can be scrutinized. It is pointed out that Security by Obscurity is not the best route
My work here is dung.
What the fuck is "Pwned"? I thought this was a news site, not an AOL chatroom.
Very similar exploits have been shown to be possible against Diebold machines.
The difference isn't that nobody is doing this in the US. It's that nobody is listening in the US. In order to become a democratic country again, you don't need to elect a new president, you need to elect a new media.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Hrm, funny, every time we complain that slashdot should go through the process of automating a simple mirror process to avoid hammering an unsuspecting server into rubble, all the "editors" go pointing at the FAQ as some sort of ironclad reasoning against doing so. But here we have an "editor" instructing the readership to do slashdot's work for them. This all just points to the fact that OSTG will pay the bandwidth bills if it means ad revenue, but doesn't want to actually foot the bill to use their server complex for disseminating information.
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I've been keeping tabs on the Diebold stories coming from U.S. news sources, and it's not like the Diebold problems have been kept secret. Nevertheless, many Americans have reacted to the information with a collective yawn.
So here we have a similar set of circumstances--only the nation at risk has really changed--and the Dutch appear to be fighting mad over this. What gives?
what we need is simplicity when it comes to voting, not complexity. i believe we should never go to electronic voting, and even get rid of mechanical voting booths, which has a sordid history of tampering
of course you can do fraud scams with simple paper ballots too: lose them for entire districts, stuff the boxes with fake votes, etc. but any more complexity in the voting system doesn't remove these scams, it just adds a new layer of possible scams
fraud happens in all forms of voting mechanisms, and voting is just too much of an important and vulnerable part of our social cohesion and the source of so much faith in and integrity of our government. being so vital and vulnerable, the point in my mind would be to oversimplify the voting process on purpose. the more complex the system, the more points of failure and the more possibilities of fraud. so make the process very simple: paper ballots
i mean seriously, why the technophilia? voting is a problem that is not solved better with more technology, just made more complex. paper ballots, period, end of story, for all time. the slashdots crowd of any crowd of people should know all about the various and sordid ways malfeasance can be achieved in electronic communication and electronic storage. voting is not a complex math problem. it's very simple. no computer need apply
electronic voting can be a downright scary prospect. don't mess with it, simplify it, which means avoiding computers in the voting process like the plague. i'm not a luddite, i am simply saying that specifically in reference to the voting process, it must be simplified technologically to ensure faith and integrity in our government
because people already doubt enough about how much their vote counts. why give them yet another paranoid schizophrenic reason for them to think their vote doesn't count/ doesn't matter ("it doesn't matter man, it's all in the computer, and they just change the votes to whatever they want them to be man")
bottom line: faith and integrity in our government is far more of an important issue than any speed of transmission/ tabulation. no electronic voting. no mechanical voting. paper ballots only. of course malfeasance can still occur with paper ballots. but with more complex systems, you only add more points for manipulation. this is not a luddite's point of view. i am as much a technophile as the next slashdotter. i just have an appreciation for the limits of technology's ability to solve problems, and that for some limited subset of problems, due to malfeasance and the potential for it, more technology need not apply. voting is such a problem
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
You obviously do not talk to many 16-22 year olds, some of the views they espouse are frightening. I chalk it up to going through school systems where surveillance, random searches, and cops in the halls are normal things. They have been desensitized to the tools of the police state, and it is starting to show.
You say you want a revolution....
The basic test for any voting system is: how does it compare to paper ballots marked with a pen and dropped into a box by the voter? If it's not clearly more secure than that, don't use it. So far it doesn't seem any of the alternatives measure up.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
I was attempting to explain this to someone the other day. You don't need to alter the votes after the fact, though that may be easier. All you need is a good statistical guess (say, a poll by the local newspaper). Given that, you calculate the skew necessary for a candidate to win. Then, you simply tell the machine to randomly record a vote for person X as a vote for person Y every a certain percentage of the time. You only need to do this in specific areas where the races are close, concede a loss in areas where the skew would be too large, and presume victory in areas where the bias is for your candidate.
In the US, you could steal an election with a small software update on a small percentage of the machines. The tallies would all add up and most of the votes counted would reflect the votes cast -- but just enough wouldn't to skew the ultimate result. The only hint you would have something was wrong would be a minor but crucial deviation between exit poll results and the official count.
It makes for a good simulation for students to put together to see just how simple it is to do.
"I wonder if any "patriotic" Americans crackers will hack the digital machines collecting/counting votes in the upcoming election to favor Democrats in response to all the reports the past 6+ years that Republicans are getting more than their share of the benefit."
Oh god I hope not.
If the machines are vulnerable to compromise, there is no advantage in simply giving the election to *anyone* who is a legitimate candidate. That's just as bad as sitting back and letting the GOP (supposedly) steal it their way. Two wrongs don't make a right.
If someone were to do this, I'd rather see 100% of the votes go to "Mickey Mouse" instead, since nobody in their right mind would ever write-in their favorite cartoon character, much less vote for him if it was an actual option.
That way, there's *no* question that the machines are hackable. The story itself will also unfold with a mix of hilarity, dismay and (most important of all) a non-partisan wash of the election results. This makes it prime-time media fodder, un-encumbered by partisan politics, which is just what you want.
If you re-program those machines to show child porn on election day, you'll surely get a scandal, even if the actual votes don't get manipulated ... but then, a little background picture showing a naked breast will do as well. Just be careful that the nipple isn't obscured by the names of the candidates. :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
For those of you keeping score, a good portion of Americans have essentially given up on their government, which allows it to get away with murder. I honestly can't think of a single thing that Congress would stop this administration from doing. The politicians in power don't listen to us, and our only choices on election day are between two candidates who are ready to sell their soul and lie to the public all over again.
And now we continually get reports that the politicians no longer need the public to get elected because of these new fangled e-voting machines. I write letters, I vote, I tell others about all of it, and yet the bastards keep doing what they do and don't go anywhere.
True democracy only works when the populace is educated enough to make smart decisions. You could counter by saying vacuous crap like, "well why aren't you running?" But in the end the public is apathetic because it's takes too much work to care about this crap. Americans are rediculously lazy, you know. (After all we invented the internet so we could browse pr0n without walking into a shady bookstore.)
[/apathy]
sorry but it's not only the school immserion into a draconian watch environment but the parents at home beign good sheep and echoing the BS the press and government are spewing. Most of these soccer moms enjoy having freedom taken away to protect them from that terrorist hiding in the bushes just outside.
If the parents at home told the kids they did not approve of what was happening, and got off their asses and told the schools at pta mettings and other opportunities things would be very different.
Kids do pay attention to the parents... and they see mommie and daddy happily rolling over and playing dead.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
That is my experience at small liberal arts schools, but every large state school I have hit recently, I hear people saying things like "If I have nothing to hide I don't care if people spy on me", "All mexicans (not just illegals) should be deported", among things like "We need to support the president even if he was wrong about our reason for getting ibnto this war". My only consolation is that most of these people also espouse that "I do not vote because it does not change anything".
You say you want a revolution....
In Belgium, the source code for voting machines has been made available and independent experts have pointed numerous flaws. No one seems to care, but that's off topic.
My point is this : these experts explained that the only way to make the vote truly verifiable is to have a paper trail for each vote. I believe RMS said something similar about this problem.
'Pwned' may have started as a typo, but it's now a full-fledged word with a different meaning than 'owned'. Compare:
I owned that car. (That car used to be mine, before I sold it)
I pwned that car. (We were racing, and I left it way behind)
First there was the slang word "ownage", which means dominance, and is only loosely related to the verb "own". Once ownage was widely used, people started using it in other forms: own, owned, owning. These are spelled and pronounced the same as the non-slang verb to own, but are not the same word in people's minds. This sort of thing happens all the time in languages, and what tends to happen is that people look for a way to separate the two words. Then a few people started using "pwned" satirically (to say, "I'm using this word in the sense a person who can't type would use it"). Well, pwn (pronounced "pone") just so happens to be a syllable with no widespread meaning, which makes it prime real estate for a new word to form. So when a few people started using "pwned", it caught on quickly and replaced the slang meaning of "owned". Voila, a new word is born. In a few years its spelling will probably be normalized to "powned", and then it'll be here to stay.
You don't need to be a Republican, but I'm still waiting to hear of any defrauded elections that elected a Democrat since, say, Republicans took over the House in 1994, over a decade ago.
I live in NYC - we know about machine politics, ward heelers and all kinds of fraud. But no evidence of them lately. The Chicago examples that people usually think of are ancient history. We're talking about criminal fraud happening next month, by those doing it in the past 2-10 years. That sounds like "Republicans" to me.
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make install -not war