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Diebold Disks May Have Been For Testers
opencity writes "The Washington Post reports on the two Diebold source disks that were anonymously sent to a Maryland election official this past week. Further investigation has lead individuals involved to believe the disks came from a security check demanded by the Maryland legislature sometime in 2003." From the article: "Critics of electronic voting said the most recent incident in Maryland casts doubt on Lamone's claim that Maryland has the nation's most secure voting system. "There now may be numerous copies of the Diebold software floating around in unauthorized hands," said Linda Schade, co-founder of TrueVoteMD, which has pressed for a system that provides a verifiable paper record of each vote."
The new tagging system is cool. Diebold gets my "wretchedhiveofscumandvillainy" tag.
Good. Cheap. Fast. Pick Two.
Can't play on ranked servers without a cd key and the gameplay itself is more boring than WoW. I'll stick with BF2.
If the attackers can use the source code to attack the machines then the machines aren't secure and probably wouldn't withstand an attack from someone who had access to the machine even without source code.
Having numerous copies floating around is a good thing if disclosure of security holes is encouraged, and the fact that Diabold are implying that the security of their systems rely on people not having access to the source code is a very bad thing.
Lets look at things logically. The only people who would rig the election using those machines would have to have physical access to the machines, and if they did they wouldn't need the source code to highlight security holes. If the source code was released then the people who would be advantaged would be the people who would responsibly disclose security holes.
If the software was well designed, this wouldn't matter at all. I mean it should be clean and simple, and secure. All incoming data should be validated, all data should be stored, and a mile wide system audit trail should be created at the same time. Then, spit out the paper version with a transaction # so you can run it right back against the system.
Instead, I bet it's a pile of shit. Recycled code, buffer vulnerabilities, piles of ad hoc crap, with poor documentation.
I hope someone does find a way to exploit the code. People need to wake the hell up.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Face it, it would probably be a more secure voting system if they voted by email. They could even make it into a computer game to encourage more young people to vote!
Although, if they did vote by email, imagine the junkmail vote....
You gotta wonder about any politician that wants no paper trail of his own votes. Why is he not interested in having hardcopy proof that he really did win this or that election? (or she, or she, I hope to the gods that Americans aren't backward enough to have only male options in parliament).
Forgive if if I misunderstood, but shouldn't Linda Schade be happy that there's copies of the software available for public scrutiny instead of complaining about it? If she's really concerned with the security of electronic voting, surely she would be in favour of the software being verifiable?
If I didn't misunderstand, someone in D.C. should give this lady a call and explain to her the pitfalls of "security through obscurity" and why openness is a Good Thing.
that the versions, that have been anonymously submitted, were from the last election. Could someone be trying to tell us something? Will a third party have the chance to examine the contents?
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Diebold whines about how the source code to their voting software is secret and copyrighted and blah blah... but you know what? Accurate democratic elections easily outweigh the need of any company providing voting software to keep their software secret. The government ought to be hiring a software company on contract to provide the service of writing voting software, not buying a product from them.
This is assuming, of course, that there's any overall benefit to digital voting in the first place, which there really isn't. Digital elections are a terrible idea -- stick with paper. Oh no! We'll have to wait a few more hours to have complete results! Big fucking deal.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
I was one of the RABA testers. We discussed this today and we returned the disks to the testers. The leaks came from Linda Lamone's OWN OFFICE!
Just before the 2002 election, a secret "patch" was distributed by order of the president of Diebold without the knowledge of election officials, according to several whistleblowers. You know, the guy who promised to "deliver [Ohio's] votes to the President".
Who gives a fuck if J0e Hax0r can compromise a voting machine when secret code can be installed on thousands, if not all, of the voting machines at the last minute with absolutely no oversight and nobody knowing about it? Voting, to borrow from one of the current "President's" minions, is a "quaint" and outdated practice.
Considering that paper ballots have been used for TWO CENTURIES. Jesus Christ. Just make a machine that scans the barcode on a piece of paper, punches holes in it, and copies the data so no duplicate votes can be made or votes be changed since there will be a paper back up to turn in that will back up the electronic vote, and the voter gets a carbon copy of the paper. Wow. How hard was that to think up? Now, can I have all of the money that Diebold has been getting?!
Never monkey with another monkey's monkey.
Perhaps she's concerned about the give_election_to_highest_bidder() function being discovered..
What is funny is that no one has commented on the real story here - Diebold sent a copy of the source code for a security audit, as requested. Maryland's security team then leaked the code to external people and used the incident to claim that Diebold's security is awful...
The real lesson here is the lengths some politicians will go to so that they appear "right".
(OK, and Diebold also has security issues - but that is a side issue, everyone has security issues. These are the guys making ATMs, for goodness sake. A voting machine that is as secure as an ATM is probably good enough. You can't stop human fraud via a machine - humans win every time.)
while (sig==sig) sig=!sig;
I hope to the gods that Americans aren't backward enough to have only male options in parliament
Actually, our options for Parliament are even more limited than that...
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
You, the voter, need to physically move your verified ticket into a box under the watchful eye of the election judge. This MUST NOT be done by machine, unless the machine also does it in an easily visible fashion under the watchful eye of an election judge - which is simply not what's going on.
I early voted on a Diebold voter verified machine - and it's NOT good enough. I even had a nice conversation with the technical election judge, and since it did print a verified trail I did have to go home and think about this before I realized how it sucked.
They totally and complete circumvented the idea of a voter verified paper trail.
The way this machine works is you vote, it prints, you can see-but-not-touch the printout. You can vote AGAIN (up to 3 times) and it voids the previous printouts. Again, without you touching them. Which means the process expects that some percentage of its paper trail will be voided. The printouts get sent into some magic compartment.
So 1) there's no way except by noise for the election monitors to know if it printed a variety of extra votes. And they were pretty quiet.
2) There's absolutely zero way to know if it went back and voided your vote, because there's plenty of precedent for voiding votes.
3) It can absolutely tell via paper alone who voted in which order; it's on a spool. Which could be easily tracked by anyone who watched what order people voted at that machine. Your votes are even less anonymous.
*sigh*
(Ok, so I posted this on the previous Diebold story - sue me. It's important, so I reposted it, Karma be damned.)
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
"A voting machine that is as secure as an ATM is probably good enough."
Wasn't it just a few weeks ago people were finding the passwords for ATMs 'hidden' right there on the net with instructions on how to reprogram them from the front pannel so that it thought the 20s slot was actually dispensing $5s???
If this is the security we can expect...well, I just hope my side finds the password list before the other side. Those bastards are slimy cut and run warmongers who want to stay the course of flipflopping.
"These are the guys making ATMs, for goodness sake. A voting machine that is as secure as an ATM is probably good enough."
If the system were as secure as an ATM network I would have to agree. An ATM gives you a bit of paper to prove the transaction took place and are fully auditable by the bank, the voting machines in question do not give a receipt and do not leave an audit trail. The fact that diebold also makes ATM's indicates nothing less than malice in the design of such a piss poor security scheme for their voting machines.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Back in 2004 computer programmer Clint Curtis testified under oath that he had been asked by a congressman to write software that would make it possible to rig elections. He quite blandly states that "anyone" (with the expertise) could write software to rig elections, because the system has not been secured in any way.
And when you gaze long enough into the code, the code will also gaze into you.
I'd argue that the source code for voting machine should be made public in any circumstance. There is *no* reason to keep any part of the counting process secret. If there are exploitable holes in this process, that means the *process* is at fault, and should be redone until there are no holes.
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
>A voting machine that is as secure as an ATM is probably good enough.
That's not what we're getting, as the research and disclosures have made painfully clear.
In any case, Diebold has had some trouble with ATMs, including the ATM reprogrammed as a jukebox and the ATMs infected by a virus.
Voting machines are a harder and more safety-critical application than ATMs. Voting machines have to preseve anonymity. Imagine how that would complicate banking. Then, the worst case failure of an ATM is that some money changes hands inappropriately and laywers earn lots of money sorting it out. The worst case failure of a voting system is an election lost to fraud, meaning the victors are the crooks. The damage is potentially incalculable: think of the nations ruined by having the wrong leaders.
Proper tags for this article may include "Diebold" "voting machines" "Maryland"
Surely you can think of some more useful tags like "electoral fraud", "corruption," "cronyism" ...
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
"A voting machine that is as secure as an ATM is probably good enough." No, it isn't. You defraud my ATM you can steal my money, but the bank will reimburse me, and overall there's not much harm done. You steal my vote, you can do a lot worse things to me than take my money away.
You obviously haven't done any sort of cryptography. (And yes, I have and do do cryptography and cryptoanalysis.)
I'll address the second and third paragraphs first of all since it's more on topic before refuting the first paragraph.
I never said that a closed source software has to be inherently less secure than open source software. Whether the source is open or not doesn't have any direct implications on the security of the software. I said or implied that closed alrogithms are inherently less trustworthy than closed algorithms. Peer revue is an old and very well tested notion that lays the foundation for modern cryptography, and it is more than "look at the source and find flaws". I'll quickly outline the reasons for it here.
On Corey Doctorow's excellent speech on DRM he slyly called this Schneider's Law: "any person can invent a security system so clever that she or he can't think of how to break it". In other words if you thought of it then you probably only see its benifits without seeing its flaws. For someone to see the flaws they have to be able to think differently; not necessarily be smarter than you, just be able to think differently from you. The chances of getting someone to be able to do this in a small organisation is slim. Even sending it out to technical officers only increases the chances of it being found slightly.
The next reason more specific to this situation comes when you look at the likely attackers of the system. When looking at the voting machine you tend to think of politicians to be the most likely to compromise security. You might also have major corporations with a political adgenda, foreign governments, even private citizens. In other words, everyone. Not many people actually realise that this includes the programmers themselves!
Do you trust every person in Diabold? I don't even know them - who the fuck are they to have control over my vote? (Luckily I'm not American so they don't have control over my vote) If the code is secret then they not only have the means but they also have the ability to do it without getting caught! If you personally don't have access to the code you are simply giving your vote to the programmers and trusting them to do the right thing. I'm not saying that they're necessarily bad people, but there's a lot of money in the US elections, and everyone has a price.
I haven't really gone through that thoroughly and I think I've missed more than a few things but I don't really have that much time free. I'll get onto the first paragraph now. Firstly, gathering an algorithm without source from a binary is pretty trivial and as I said before the people most likely to attack these machines will have access to the machines themselves and thus have access to the binaries. Even without this, perhaps not knowing the algorithm is a disadvantage to a cryptoanalysist but even then many algorithms have identifiers in their output giving clues as to which algorithm it is. It's definitely not infinitely more useful to know the algorithm when determining what the message says. Even so if you're relying on an algorithm's secrecy to ensure security in your communications then as soon as the algorithm is released (and it most often is in more serious situations) then your communications are compromised. Yes you said all things being equal but the thing is the algorithm isn't supposed to be the secret, the key is.
Now that was a long rant.
(OK, and Diebold also has security issues - but that is a side issue, everyone has security issues. These are the guys making ATMs, for goodness sake. A voting machine that is as secure as an ATM is probably good enough. You can't stop human fraud via a machine - humans win every time.)
There's even more money and power in cracking elections then there is in cracking ATMs, so no it's not good enough.
The Baltimore sun says that "Kagan called the attorney general's office, and word of the disks began to spread. Learning of the development, Linda H. Lamone, the state's elections chief, reported Kagan's possession of the code to the FBI yesterday [Oct 19]."
Which only reinforces my point, since
Attorney General > State Election Chief
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
ABC News is running a poll titled Is Your Vote Safe? that asks:
"Are you confident that your vote is safe and will be counted in the election?"
Oddly, this poll seems to be suffering some voting irregularities itself. Repeatedly refreshing the results yields this strange sequence:
approx 12:30am, 10-23-06
no: 738 yes: 101 ns: 86 tot: 925
12:53am
no: 743 yes: 101 ns: 87 tot: 931
12:54am
no: 737 yes: 101 ns: 86 tot: 924
12:55am
no: 746 yes: 101 ns: 88 tot: 935
12:56am
no: 670 yes: 84 ns: 80 tot: 834
12:57am
no: 721 yes: 99 ns: 85 tot: 905
12:58am
no: 734 yes: 101 ns: 86 tot: 921
... in the backwards, barbarous and poor country of Brasil, our elections have been 99% eletronic for the past 9 years, without any hicup... one can imagine that perhaps the monkeys, snakes and tigers are helping us vote somehow...
People will use something for whatever suits them best, not what the marketer says to use it for. Clearly slashdotters want to use tags for one-word comments, so that's what they get used for. Music didn't really occur to the inventors of the phonograph, and look how that turned out.
Melissa
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
The fact that diebold also makes ATM's indicates nothing less than malice in the design ...
Diebold BOUGHT the voting machine deisgn (by buying the company that made it). It is unrelated to their ATM designs.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I wasn't trying to imply throwing out secret ballots, just pointing out that ATM's are auditable and these machines are not. The "bit of paper" I was talking about is not kept by the voter but the candidates can use them to audit the machines without connecting individuals to "bits of paper".
The ATM analogy is a bad one since banks must connect an individual to a transaction. Voting machines must not connect an individual to a transaction while still ensuring one vote per person. It's not particularly hard to do, the issues have been well understood for at least a couple of centuries.
Having said that, diebold have shown they understand security and auditing issues by producing reliable ATM's, they have not done the same for voting machines. Given diebold's experience with ATM security issues it is hard to see how incompetence has played a part in this particular cock-up.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Let's see if you can tell where these are from:
fud, no, yes, rms, notfud
scam, slownewsday
yay, spam, spamhaus, haha
wikipedia, copyright
fud, notfud, monopoly
'glad to see the system is working well.
The ______ Agenda
Receipts and audit trails in voting systems are solving the wrong problem.
If you have a leaky roof, the correct solution is not to install a drainage trough in the floor. If you go down the floor drain route you will eventually end up installing an alarm system to detect blockages, a plug-in air freshener to deal with the smell when the blockage alarm fails to go off and the drain gets blocked, joss sticks for use during power failures when neither the alarm nor the plug-in air freshener work, and you'll still have a leaky roof.
If there is any way for the person who cast a vote to be able to identify it as theirs, then there is also a way for someone else to do identify who cast a vote. Which creates the opportunity for corruption. If voters are issued with a receipt for the transaction, which they remove, then a failure mode is introduced where the receipt does not match the ballot. Also, unless receipts are readily falsifiable, an opportunity for corruption is created (imagine a boss allowing workers time off to vote as long as they shew their receipt, showing a vote for the local Tory candidate and the boss's cousin, on returning to the factory). And if receipts are readily falsifiable then they are of questionable value. If there is a separate audit log stored within the machine, there is still the failure mode where the log does not match the ballot.
Much better would be to ensure that procedures are in place such that it is as difficult as possible for the result to be interfered with after a ballot is cast. The easiest and best way of doing this is still pencil-and-paper, one race per ballot, one box per race (with different coloured and/or sized papers, so that a ballot in the wrong box can quickly be identified and moved to the right pile) and manual counting in the polling station, under the scrutiny of representatives of all candidates. Disabled voters should be allowed to bring a carer whom they trust to help them use the same system as everybody else.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
A voting machine that is as secure as an ATM is probably good enough.
I'll let you in on a dirty little secret. When it comes to security, "good enough" is good enough.
In the case of ATMs, banks make a huge amount of money (or at least avoid losign a huge amount of business) by having them. But they don't have to be particularly secure -- just secure enough that the marginal cost of adding a bit of security is greater than the marginal increment of savings. In other words in business you don't "spend a buck to save a buck".
"Good enough" security systems abound; for example credit cards and checks. The security of these systems are extremely lax, and consequently there is a _ton_ of fraud commited with them. But the cost of paying for fraud (to the banks) is less than trying to get an increment of security. Businesses do not subscribe to the "millions for defense, not one dollar for tribute" theory of security.
It seems like a manufacturer of ATMs would be the perfect manufacturer of voting machines, until you take into account the difference between "good enough" for an ATM and "good enough" for a voting machine. Money is fungible -- a bit of fraud here and there is amply made up by profits elsewhere. Votes are not like that. Having a fair election in 95% of the districts doesn't make up for having a fraudulent election in 5%, especially when those districts can be strategically chosen.
It would be better to pick somebody with experience in systems where system failures have horrible, unthinkable results rather than a vendor where failures are just an incovenience. Somebody who makes avionics, or medical instrumenation, or defense command and control systems.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
somebody post OpenDieVote software before November 7th, please ;)
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
The "penalties" one would suffer for acquiring and distributing this code, the very same penalties that prevent BoEs from publishing it for public inspection, have absolutely nothing to do with any law about elections.
No, we are talking about software licensing violations and copyright protections. Diebold has a mile-long list of things you can and cannot do with their software -- and they agressively use their lackies inside the BoEs to wield those contract terms in a way that is designed to intimidate those who would try to secure our elections by threatening their jobs.
Someone had to do it.