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."

Comments

And the problem with paper was?

[seanadams.com]

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?

Re:And the problem with paper was?

[Lockejaw]

And please, can we quit calling them "computer security researchers"? What's wrong with hackers? When did we start on the euphemism treadmill?

When the media decided that a "hacker" is someone who secretly breaks into your computer and fills it full of spam and child porn. So we needed a word for people who break into computers without being secretive about it and don't fill it with bad stuff.

What's wrong with paper?

[fastest fascist]

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?

Re:What's wrong with paper?

[Elemenope]

The problem with paper is...it's slow. Don't get me wrong, I don't see that as a problem; I am of the school of thought that it is no disadvantage to take a week or so to count ballots by hand. However, the public has an expectation (cultivated as it has been by TV media, mostly) that elections are to be decided ASAP. I don't know how to ween folks off of such an expectation, esp. since there is a profit motive in minute-by-minute coverage. It is hard in the Internet age to get people to understand why everything can't be as fast as a Google search.

I'm not crazy about exit polls, either, though if done accurately enough (i.e. large enough sample sizes, unbiased methodology) should be able to provide a good indication of results quickly even with a paper ballot system.

I'm completely spitballing here, but I imagine that psychologically the image of a computer as the instrument of an election is more reassuring to people (who, by and large, use computers for many routine tasks) than paper, which conjures notions of impermanence and fragility and a history of "stuffed ballot boxes" and other shenanigans; while computers in reality may be more vulnerable to such shenanigans, they do not as easily lend to such an image, and so combined with their inner mysterious mechanics, they are more easily trusted. People, scarred by the disintegrating trustworthiness of their government, desperately want some part of the political process to place their faith in.

Re:What's wrong with paper?

[TapeCutter]

"with a computer, there is no doubt, it's either a 0 or a 1." - Maybe I'm feeding a troll but here goes anyway...

Speaking as degree qualified programmer with 20yrs experience, I don't trust the machines and TFA clearly demonstrates why.

My number one reason for distrusting computerised systems is that they enable "wholesale fraud" with a single point attack, it might be "unlikely" but it is a technical possibility that the result of the whole election could be predetermined and the "race fix" can be implemented by one person sitting at a desk. Worse still it's a technical possibility that a "fix" can be done in such a way that it is undetectable after the fact.

Contrast that risk with old-fashioned paper and international observers. With that system the best a cheat can hope for is "retail fraud" - some stuffed boxes over here, the senator's hound dogs voting over there, ect. Fraud and corruption are a fact of life, nowhere on the planet can they be totally eliminated from such high stakes "games" as national elections.

The traditional paper system with it's well-known and thouroughly tested procedures minimizes the risk of a "fixed race" simply because of the fact that it is much more difficult and requires a hell of a lot more people to get away with "wholesale fraud". Speed is not a big issue since there are plenty of counters in the form of eager voulenteers from the various parties. And it's crucial to security that you pair off "opposing counters" since they also embody the imporatnt "checks and balances" of watching each other like hawks and arguing so loudly about something as mundane as "hanging chads" that even I remeber it and I live 10,000 miles away!

Link to SOS Site

[jellie]

I'm surprised there's no link to Secretary of State Debra Bowen's site that includes all the analyses, CVs/resumes, and all other documentation regarding the top-to-bottom review:
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.

Re:Ooh, Shiney!

[rbarreira]

Winston Churchill has the solution:

The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter. -- Winston Churchill.

How did the election Official get his job?

[chris_sawtell]

From the article:-

Letting the hackers have the source codes, operating manuals and unlimited access to the voting machines "is like giving a burglar the keys to your house,'' said Steve Weir, clerk-recorder of Contra Costa County and head of the state Association of Clerks and Election Officials.

This is simply not true! The analogue in the real world of locks and keys is that you have given a burgler the design blueprints of the lock. NOT the code combination or the key lever settimgs. The demonstrated ignorance of the said Steve Weir about secure computing begs the question "How did he get appointed to his positions?"

Not true!

[rbarreira]

That's not true! Voting machines are the solution to the existing problem of "how to make sure one is elected".

Why even have electronic/computer voting?

[Skapare]

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

Hacking???

[cluckshot]

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????)