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Diebold Voting Machines Audited by California
Panaqqa writes "Diebold must be wondering what else can go wrong. Considering their arrogance in the past, their comeuppance is truly well deserved. The State of California's source code review [PDF] of the Diebold voting system has been released. Additional reports will be made available as the Secretary of State determines that they do not inadvertently disclose security-sensitive information. One wonders what it will take to convince voting machine manufacturers not to do things like hard coding passwords as '12345678.'"
12345678... That sounds like the password some idiot puts on their briefcase.
09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
+2 Troll is Slashdot's way of saying groupthink is confused
how after all the many serious screw-ups and warnings that Diebold has had in the past couple of years, this report shows they still didn't do anything at all to improve the situation.
I often wondered how managers and CEO's that don't even have a clue get given companies to control. This level of obvious incompetence makes me wonder even more.
Voting machines are a technical non-solution to a non-existing problem. Counting votes by hand in public view is almost as fast, has much fewer things that could go wrong with them, and is intrinsically open to public scrunity like no machine system can ever be. Plus, it's cheaper. It works in Denmark, it should scale perfectly well to the US.
We have a psychic bond! I use that exact same password on my luggage and machines!
We're password buddies!
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
They'd never sell a single one. No bank would accept an ATM that couldn't accurately track the thousand or so transactions that they see each day, or that anyone could gain control of by typing in a few keys followed by "12345678".
And yet somehow (through much campaign cash, etc.) they managed to convince politicians that all that stuff would be too hard and unnecessary in voting machines, despite the technology already being available from the same company. That it's not hard to count accurately millions, even billions, of dollars in transactions each day, but that it's too hard to simply increase by one the count in the proper register to greater than a few percent accuracy. And despite numerous security incidents, they are still fighting tooth and nail these simple things.
I'm not convinced electronic voting is necessary...but I'm wary of any politician that keeps trying to tell me there's no need to increase the security of such systems. Unless they say they're OK with their own banks using that kind of security, voting shouldn't use it either.
It's a step in the right direction, but really, is an audit even needed?
This is like building a nylon tent to hold your valuables, then performing an audit to evaluate the strength of its zipper. The entire concept is idiotic from the start.
There's a simple solution to voting machine security: use paper ballots. The machines can help you fill them out, but the result should always be a paper ballot which is the authoritative record of your vote. Simple, easy, secure. Why isn't this being done? Who knows, but it's clear the concerns of the people in charge are something other than correct vote counts.
From AV-TSX bootloader code:
// Check for library not initialized or (x,y) out of range
// Compute the frame buffer offset and write the pixel
void GlibPutPixel(UINT xx, UINT yy, Pixel_t Color)
{
if(FrameBuffer != FALSE || (xx < USER_X) || (yy < USER_Y))
{
FrameBuffer[FB_OFFSET(xx,yy)] = Color;
}
}
TCHAR name;
_stprintf(&name, _T("\\Storage Card\\%s"), findData.cFileName);
Install(&name, hInstance);
First uses logical OR instead of logical AND to check boundaries, second writes a string where there is only storage for one character!
I can almost imagine that being a deliberate ploy. "
I'm sorry your honour, but one of our programmers (no longer under our employ) hard coded a weak password in complete disregard of coding standards. Regretably, the weakness of the password has enabled certain parties to guess what it is, and thereby subvert the electoral process. But it's not our fault."
Hanlon's Razor be dammned. In cases like this we should start assuming malice unless they can prove stupidity beyond any reasonable doubt.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
If you believe this is nothing more than pure incompetence, then you too have been fooled. This level of incompetence is usually indicative of strong intent that Hanlon's razor will be used by others to essentially protect the perpetrators from punishment for their immoral and/or illegal activities. This is just another way to game the system.
The votes on 10 ballots are totaled and this total is recorded on a marker sheet placed on top. Then the bundle is tied up. (10 ballots)
10 of those bundles are totaled on a different marker sheet and bundled together. (100 ballots)
10 of those bundles are totaled on a different marker sheet and bundled together. (1,000 ballots)
10 of those bundles are totaled on a different marker sheet and bundled together (10,000 ballots)
And so on. The idea being that any individual bundle can be quickly verified or re-counted. And because it's all base 10, it is easy for MOST humans to visually verify the bundles themselves. The ones that can count to ten, that is.
Didn't you even bother to read the sentence you quoted yourself. Fortify was used to find areas to investigate manually. These tools do have many shortcomings, but they do also find many legitimate problems. Using them to find starting points for manual investigations you might otherwise overlook is exactly the right way to use them. Believing them to produce a laundry list of actual problems is, as you pointed out, not.
Voting machines are a technical non-solution to a non-existing problem.
Agreed.
Counting votes by hand in public view is almost as fast, has much fewer things that could go wrong with them, and is intrinsically open to public scrunity like no machine system can ever be. Plus, it's cheaper.
Wrong on faster and cheaper. As the recount in some Florida counties showed in the 2000 US presidential election.
Voting on paper is fine, but the paper should be mechanically counted. Hand counts should be a last resort when the machines are unable to read a vote or are malfunctioning.
Last night California decertified all of the electronic voting machines on the market. I thought that would be a bigger story today, but haven't seen it anywhere except for blackboxvoting.org
From page 51:
.ins files are used. An attacker who included a file with a long name or a name
Issue 5.2.24: AV-TSX startup code contains blatant errors.
287 TCHAR name;
288 _stprintf(&name, _T(''\\Storage Card\\%s''), findData.cFileName);
289 Install(&name, hInstance);
Here, name is not a character array but a single character in memory. The stprintf function
expects its first parameter to be a character array, so the programmer had to use the&operator
to get the address of name, rather than its value. The result is an obvious buffer overflow. A
string that includes the filename, which could be under an attacker's control, gets copied over
whatever data resides in the memory region following name.
That this code works at all seems purely accidental. Memory corruption occurs even when
legitimate
containing particular characters might be able to crash the program or, possibly, execute
malicious code.
This bug sheds light on the vendor's software engineering practices, because it is a very
unusual error for an experienced C++ programmer to make. Characters and character arrays
are very different constructs in C++. Students using the language for the first time might
confuse the two, but experienced programmers who understand basic concepts like pointers
would be unlikely to confuse them. The probability that an experienced C++ programmer
would make such a mistake or overlook it during even a cursory review of the code is
exceptionally low. This suggests to us that after this code was written it was not reviewed
by any other engineers at Diebold.
That's gold Jerry! Gold!
There is another kind of evil which we must fear most, and that is the indifference of good men. -- Boondock Saints
Look it up. Ballot readers are compromised as easily as the original machines.
An ideal arrangement is to have a printed ballot as the official ballot, and a supervised hand-counted count which is the OFFICIAL count. Then, the original voting machines can also perform an electronic tally themselves, and this electronic tally can serve as a check for the hand count. If the two differ significantly, something has gone wrong, and an audit must be performed.
If the media want to report the electronic tally as a preliminary result, let them. Simply declare that only the hand count (which can be supervised) is official.
Top to bottom review docs:
s ource=All&type=All&title=&Search=Submit
http://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/elections_vsr.htm
Also the public hearing where a university computer science professor describes the results of the red team testing. The audio starts very poor but improves after 25 minutes, but I've ONLY been able to watch it *streaming* (which is a drag). The hearing is 6 hours long and if anyone can provide a download link, I'd be grateful.
http://www.calchannel.com/search.php?date=073007&
At 5 hrs, 26 min. Jim Soper presents a very good technical rebuttal to the manufacturers official positions, and receives some good applause from the crowd.
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.