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Researchers Crack Every Certified CA Voting Machine
ewhac writes "The San Francisco Chronicle is reporting that computer security researchers throughout the University of California system managed to crack the security on every voting machine they tested that has been approved for use in the state. The researchers are unwilling to say how vulnerable the machines are, as the tests were conducted in an environment highly advantageous to the testers. They had complete access to the devices' source code and unlimited time to try and crack the machines. No malicious code was found in any of the machines, but Matt Bishop, who led the team from UC Davis, was surprised by the weakness of the security measures employed. The tests were ordered by Secretary of State Debra Bowen, who has until Friday of next week to decide whether to decertify any of the machines for use in the upcoming Presidential primary election."
So before, the only people who probably knew how to crack these would have been the people who designed them, plus whoever else had access to the source code, plus probably a whole bunch of administrators who would have access to the data files during the election.
Now, as if that's not bad enough, in addition to all of them we have a whole team of hackers who have proven that they know SPECIFICALLY how to do it. And by the way, they hacked both the voting machines themselves AND the back-end remote machines that do the tabulating.
And those facts are all public knowledge now!
So if these machines were merely "ridiculously" insecure to begin with, now they're just split wide open like a dvda. Yay democracy. What exactly does Ms Bowen need until next Friday to fucking think about?
And please, can we quit calling them "computer security researchers"? What's wrong with hackers? When did we start on the euphemism treadmill?
If voting is the core of a democracy then the transparency of the process MUST be paramount. Chuck out the whole concept of voting if average citizens have to understand and correctly interpret the latest whiz-bang technology.
Considering how strong the push for voting machines is, you'd think there's something terribly wrong with paper ballots. What is it? To me, they seem to work fine, and knowing the system for counting the votes doesn't let you compromise the impartiality of the system. What benefit do these voting machines offer that justifies the risks?
"Voting machines are the non-solution of a non-existing problem" (not my quote, I heard it somewhere).
The quote is completely right.
a) What is wrong with pen&paper voting?
b) Voting machines do not solve any problems: If we say for example a) was about the money: Voting machines cost all-in-all more money than pen&paper voting.
http://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/elections_vsr.htm
The overview by Matt Bishop is actually quite an interesting read. In it, he says that they could have found more problems with the three systems, but they were limited by time: The short time allocated to this study has several implications. The key one is that the results presented in this study should be seen as a "lower bound"; all team members felt that they lacked sufficient time to conduct a thorough examination, and consequently may have missed other serious vulnerabilities. In addition, he also cites the lack of proper information from the vendors as another problem.
It should also be noted that a fourth vendor, Election Systems and Software (ES&S) missed the deadline for submitting their systems for the review. I'll be cynical and just assume that they decided to skip the initial review than to have a bunch of computer researchers hack their systems.
The only secure machine is one that is OFF. If it isn't off then I'm always going to bet on the hacker. IANAP, but I feel very sorry for the challenges that programmers face. They have to review and analyze code for bugs, flaws, and features, they have bosses that demand profit and features. Those 1337 boys only need to find one flaw, the programmers have to find and fix all of them. I'm not surprised at all that all of the machines were cracked, given a high enough profile, the right conditions, and a motivated h4x0r any system is vulnerable.
load "$",8,1
Hey, do something for your country and humanity, send letters to your representatives or whatever you can do to stop this electronic voting madness. Posting on slashdot won't do much.
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
I have a post from three years ago (#8944789) detailing how stuff works here in Brasil, for your entertainment:
Oh, yes, I will repeat myself over and over...
... when you get your first job. If you are a mandatory voter (literate person from 18 to 65) you have to go to Electoral Court and register to vote. In the process of registering, you receive the "Título de Eleitor" (voter id), in which you have the number of you voting section. To change jobs, and specially to get a government job, you have to prove you are a registered and regularized voter (you voted in the last election, or regularized your voting situation after it).
by hummassa (157160) on 2004.04.22 20:06 (#8944789)
Till these topics die.
I live in Brasil. We have had voting machines in the last 12-14 years (yes, twelve to fourteen -- it depends the size of the city you are in). Brazilians here: the first election here in Belo Horizonte to use the machines were the mayoral (and city council, state representation, governor, house and senate) before FHC was elected (as I count it, 2 years + 8 years + 1 1/2 = 11,5 years). I know it, because I was "mesário" (election "table" official? election "clerk"? what is a good English translation?) in the previous election, and in the two subsequent elections. IIRC, there were electronic ballot boxes in Rio and Sao Paulo in the election before that (the only two cities larger than Belo Horizonte).
Our voting machines are mainly of three different (internally) models: (a) the old ones, that use VirtuOS (*) as the OS, (b) the new ones, that use WinCE as the OS, and (c) the newest and deprecated ones that have the second printer to print your vote, show it to you inside a clear acrilic case, and mix it with others inside the machine.
Externally, all of them look roughly the same: a box similar to the old "portable computers" of the eighties, with a 5-6" diagonal LCD and a big numerical keypad in the right side of the screen, that has, besides the 0-9 keys, "confirma" (ok), "erro" (cancel), and "branco" (white).
The electoral process (from the point of view of the voter) begins
In the election day, you scan the newspapers (or the Superior Electoral Court website), search for the address of your section, and go there. No, there is no transit vote, you can only vote at that address. If you can't get there, you'll have to "justify" your absence.
At the section, you will present your voter id to one the "mesários", and if you don't have it on you, you can still vote (you can show other valid id), but will be delayed. The mesário will search for your name in the vote-ticket sheet, and annex it to your id while you vote. You will sign a receipt in a sheet, and proceed to the voting "booth". Another "mesário" will type your voter id # in a remotely connected keypad, setting the machine in the "ready to vote" mode.
The voting "booth" is really only a desk with the voting machine over it, facing nobody else in the room, and sometimes with a cardboard "cover" around it. You will "dial" the numbers of the candidates, in order. when you dial all the digits of one candidate, a star-trek-like chime rings, his/her face will show up in the screen, and if you digited it right, you hit "ok". otherwise, you hit "cancel" and start over. Afte
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
That's not true! Voting machines are the solution to the existing problem of "how to make sure one is elected".
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
And if the seal is tampered with, what then? It seems like an easy way to quickly invalidate a whole bunch of votes in districts that are likely to favor your opponent.
Paper elections can and has been taken over. I am not so sure at this time if any in the USA are, but Texas, Florida, and Chicago had a LONG TIME well deserved voting fraud issues. That is why EVERY box has 2 or more ppl going over the vote, with each person coming from 1 of the 2 major parties (interestingly, they are not required to have a person from all parties that are running candidates, just from the major parties). The current elections since 2000 (probably before), have shown how easy it is for general election fraud. In particular, in Florida, the gov. was not allowing votes from anybody with the same name as criminals in high democrat counties only. In ohio, they had 3 ppl (democrats) certify an election by picking certain boxes, counting them before hand, and then using those for their "random" tests. They were suppose to pick a number of random boxes and check their results as well the count. They just did not feel like doing it.
There are VERY good reasons for going to computers. Sadly, not only has the computers obviously not been designed and built well, but the vetting process in nearly all states has left a LOT to be desired. In nearly all cases, the groups have been willing to accept systems that several major companies thrust on us. What fascinated me, and should have been of interest to all the groups, is that NONE of these major machines wanted back-up paper system added in. In ALL cases, it would be their paper (i.e. get to gouge), and of course, they would be required to have somebody around to handle things (at least at the county level). This would be a recurring revenue stream for them. And yet, they fought it esp. diebold. That should be making ALL of those groups nervous, and instead it takes a judge to be looking at this issue.
The computer systems ARE the right idea. The choice and implementation have been disasters. Welcome to Amerika.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Paper ballots do have their problems. People don't always mark them consistently. Sometimes they mark one candidate then try to rub it out and mark another. The paper ballot was hard to read by electronic means and manual counting was too time consuming to get the quick results most people wanted.
Punch cards that people have to do the punching on don't always get punched right (remember the hanging chad problem). Sometimes people start to punch one hole, and realize they are in the wrong hole or change their mind real fast and try to punch another instead. Sometimes 2 or more holes are punched. Sometimes holes are punched partially. In most cases people could check, but they don't, or don't really know they should.
Computer voting was intended to eliminate these things. But that's its fundamental misguidance. Instead, it should be used to enhance them and correct the issues.
Voting station computers should do nothing more than assist a voter in creating a reliably readable paper ballot. The voting station should not be networked, and not even have any storage space. It would be an embedded machine booted from flash that is hardware wired to be unwritable, or booted from a CDROM or equivalent. It should boot very fast (embedded developers know how to do this and bring a minimal system and application up in a second). It should be rebooted between each voter.
The voting station would have a simple single sheet printer and an LCD flat screen with touch sensors. The voter would "touch" their votes and always have the ability to go back, or even jump around randomly to various offices/issues to vote on. Once done, the voter can press the "I am finally done" button to print the choices on paper.
What is printed on the paper is a combination of scannable text and bar codes with strong checksums (SHA1). The text shall be human readable (although in big elections some people might need optical reading assistance). Visually impaired people can ask for a poll worker to read back their ballot to them.
The next step is the paper ballot is taking to the reading station. The ballot is read in by another computer with a scanner. This computer scans the text and reduces it to a set of simple vote codes. These vote codes are checksummed and that is compared against the bar codes. If there is a mismatch, probably a scanner error took place, or the ballot was damaged or smudged. It flashes and beeps a warning the the ballot is not readable. This may require the voter to re-do another ballot (this one is marked as bad and the voter is given another sheet and front-of-line access to a voting station).
The scanner keeps tallies and may send results to a central office. Larger voting places may have more than one scanner and tallies will be done by a central computer. The paper ballot is then inserted UNFOLDED into a locked box.
The voter gets a receipt for having voted, but does NOT get a copy of what votes they made. If they want to remember their own votes, they must make their own notes themselves. The reason for this is that no voter should have any official statement of who they voted for to ensure no voter can "prove" to someone else who they voted for. This has been a long time standard to impede vote buying/selling, and should not change.
The computers that tally the votes could give nearly instant 100% results shortly after polls close. But that's not the end of it. Those results are not certified. The voting officials will, in the next few days, monitor the process if re-scanning all the paper ballots to ensure the results are consistent. If they are satisfied of this, then they certify the election results. If there are any issues, then the paper ballots can be manually checked.
This process is still paper based, and still just as auditable and recountable as any paper based system. It gains the avantages of consistency in the marking of ballots. Instead of being hand marked, they are "computer marked" (in a way that humans c
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
How could this have been modded "insightful"?
Aren't you glad it is public knowledge now how rediculously insecure those machines are? These machines should never have been used and the people you call "hackers" have done what the government should have done BEFORE using them for black-box voting.
Are you advocating security though obscurity where the safety of the democratic process depends on a small group of people we trust not to abuse their position? I'd much rather have a verifiable solution.
I say someone in the government is finally doing the right thing here.
Since I have on my computer the software for many of the major voting machine companies and I worked reviewing it for one of our big US States, (Not California) I might have a thing or two to say on the issue.
The first thing to understand is that the audits under the voluntary national standard for voting machine software do nothing about securing a ballot. The next thing to understand is that the public authorities don't want secure software on voting machines. -As politely as it can be said- Who in the hell do you think steals elections? --- Not the voters I can assure you! It is election officials. Next you have to understand that the purpose of modern voting machines isn't to prevent errors, it is to eliminate any evidence that they happened. Next you have to understand that some company or another wants to sell all the machines to run the election and that they don't want the election officials to be able to buy machines by another brand without having to go to the cost of ripping out the entire system by its roots and halting the whole world. In short they want to hold the political agents hostage to their company and make them pay through the nose on every election. How else does a scanner machine which might be worth $200 become a machine worth $30,000?
Now that we have identified the motives in play here and there may be a few more nasty habits around like companies wanting to control political events..... Lets get down to the brass tacks here! Any election system worth anything should have some of the following attributes and possibly some more.
(1) It must be machine independent. So that any device that fails can be easily replaced.
(2) It must be transparent in its software where anyone can see the code and see that it does what it says.
(3) It must be receipt based where it can be checked by additional 3rd party methods. Recounting must be possible and not just memory buffer checks.
(4) It should be isolated from external attack only reporting via network and protected from intrusion by device isolation. This means no USB drives and no standard internet connections etc.
(5) It must be custody of data prevented from having the political authorities being able to destroy the evidence of an election fraud.
Making elections report totals quickly accurately and with receipts and such is no problem. Technically this is very easy. I probably could write in a few days the structure and code it in a matter of months myself. I would get nowhere because the political leaders would find their methodology of stealing elections in great trouble. Unless the voters rise up and get really angry on this one, expect the development of a silent dictatorship in which you hold elections and keep on loosing to the powers that be. (Maybe it already is here????)
Never Politically Correct ~ I prefer the facts If you don't like what I say, get a life, or comment yourself.
I wouldn't.
If I *had* to, I'd have the computer be the means of *printing* a ballot only. It wouldn't tabulate.
It would then print a ballot that was both human and machine readable (OCR font anyone?).
That ballot would be placed in a box, and counted.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
This is a valid comment, but is modded into oblivion for some reason...