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Diebold Voting Machines Vulnerable to Virus Attack
mcgrew writes "PC world is reporting that Diebold's super-popular voting machines are coming under even more scrutiny. A security review has revealed that they are simply 'not secure enough to guarantee a trustworthy election.' This is according to a report from the University of California Berkley, who did a two-month top-to-bottom review of all California e-voting systems. That's a subject we've discussed before, but Diebold's setup is truly unsettling. An attacker with access to a single machine could disrupt or change the outcome of an entire election using viruses. From the article: 'The report warned that a paper trail of votes cast is not sufficient to guarantee the integrity of an election using the machines. "Malicious code might be able to subtly influence close elections, and it could disrupt elections by causing widespread equipment failure on election day," it said. The source-code review went on to warn that commercial antivirus scanners do not offer adequate protection for the voting machines. "They are not designed to detect virally propagating malicious code that targets voting equipment and voting software," it said.' Oddly, my state of Illinois, long known for election fraud, has paper trails (at least in my county) and according to Black Box Voting doesn't use Diebold anywhere."
HOW F*CKING HARD is it to make a secure voting machine?!? The thing counts and keeps track of votes! I bet i could write a secure voting machine that could handle state and federal elections securely in a couple of days in any language from assembly to bash!
Or is this basically the same story as the one cmdrtaco posted a couple of hours ago (and is still on the front page)?
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
Surely related to this article?
3 1205
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/04/14
The even scarier part is that the Diebold machines have not been decertified.
The revolution will be mocked
Frauds in the election system in America are easy. People can vote over mail, people vote in volunteer's garages, foreigners (like me) get voter's registration cards in the mail and requests from the parties to sign up and vote.
If I ever wanted to commit fraud in the election system, I would have. And that would not need to involve hacking a machine.
Until voting is centralized, managed entirely by the government, with better security mechanisms in place, it's very easy for anyone to commit fraud. People just have not thought about it yet.
I personally think the University in question should recommend a virus-free system, designed and tested to be very secure... that they wrote.
(Any number of non-windows OSes would fit, but the *BSD family just fits so well here.)
Alcohol wipes.
I would like to repeat myself by saying that voting machines should have never been permitted to be used in elections. Edison got his rejected, so why allow Diebold?
If you ask me, it's just pointless. Why can't the state government(s) just get rid of the machines and reinstate the good ol' paper votes like they used to? Do they REALLY want to keep on using Diebold machines and/or voting machines in general?
it gets worse, the current version still uses at least two hard-coded passwords -- one is "diebold" and another is the eight-byte sequence 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8 .
Here is my idea for an absolutely secure voting machine. Each person who goes into vote gets a token. Made of radioactive material. This material is heavily controlled, and outside the voting machine you have SWAT teams with geiger counters, and obviously anyone wearing a foot of lead is busted.
Voting consists of dropping the Uranium into one of several lead boxes which contain giant magnets to keep someone from trying to alter votes by moving tokens from one box to another. At the end of the day, you read the results digitally with a geiger counter. Every party can be there with representatives, disagreements can be sorted out on the spot with a manual count in front of a multiparty committee. 100% foolproof.
Basically, I got the idea from Bruce Schnier, who observed that it's not such a bad idea for people to keep their passwords written down on a piece of paper in their wallet. After all, people already know how to keep their wallets secure.
The US Military already knows how to keep weapons-grade plutonium secure. Basically, my idea is to just piggy-back on that, to keep voting secure.
A lot of people like to stick with old, low-tech stuff, don't have the will to try anything new. "What about the radiation poisoning" they would no doubt whine. Well I say progress consists in throwing out what's old and "safe" and being bold.
about the upcoming elections. If the GOP looses the White House and the Democrats keep or increase their hold on Congress, a lot of the Bush Administration (including the top two) could end up in PMITA prison once their crimes are exposed. Given that motivation, they will stop at nothing to win, including a False Flag scenario. Plus, after their success in Ohio 2004, electronic vote tampering is child's play to them.
'Common' ne 'popular'
Were that I say, pancakes?
why not make a solid-state device for this?
Have a squat over at the hobo house.
The purpose of a voting machine is to increment integers and later add them together. There's no excuse to use anything more complex than 74xx logic chips...
If we're admitting that those machines are vulnerable to hacks, is there any guarantee they weren't hacked before...say in 2004?
And if so, should this not call into question the legitimacy of the reigning monar^H^H^H^H democratically elected Shrub on Pennsylvania Ave?
Which are they using, WPA or WEP?
A corp that makes secure ATM machines designs and builds machines using ZERO of their ATM experience or technology which is on par with a high school student project (I saw the leaked software many years ago; that was totally under reported.)
This is not the typical play stupid situation that sells so well in the USA. This is clear-cut intentional negligence and I shouldn't need to go into the many possible motives for anybody to pull such scams. This isn't even that other large voting machine company who elected their own OWNER!
The difficulty is NOT making a computer COUNT or securing the totals, they distract you with the irrelevant technical details. Its in WHO YOU TRUST to implement, maintain, and secure the system that is the unsolvable difficulty (I for one, will welcome our evolved computer overlords when they take over...)
The ultimate purpose for Rube Goldberg designs is POWER (job security and customer lock in being most common motives.) When you place the power in the hands of a few you always run into trouble. IRONICALLY, the purpose for democratic voting is totally being forgotten in this pseudo debate about how the publicly inaccessible voting system operates!
Canada figured it out; however, I'd like to see a weighted voting system well implemented. Also, I would like to see a new kind of elector system so my friends can just give me their votes; its hard enough to get them to the polls on a WORK DAY... (yes, the pro-"democracy" USA never respected democracy enough to make election day on par with memorial day. Irony has become redundant.) While I'm at it, I'd like senators to go back to state appointment because the intent was to prevent an all powerful federal government.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Even if the vote is true, once the votes have been tallied, the winning party picks representatives who cast the electoral vote. Thing is, those representatives can vote for whoever they want. So far this has never changed an election but it could. There is no such thing as an unhackable computer. It sounds like all these voting machines are on a network, why not make each machine totally seperate? Make them not part of a network at all. Then at the end those voting counter people could just plug them into something and have it print out the votes. Then even if a hacker could hack one. It would just be one. Sure he could make it so that that one machine was several million votes for one side or the other but then wouldn't the people there notice when all the other machines have a couple hundred votes on them and the one hacked one has millions? The hacker would have to make it a reasonable number and to change the outcome of the election, hundreds of machines would have to be hacked. I think that it would be hard to hack that many without someone finding out.
Curiosity is a cruel master. Not quite as bad as ignorance however.
Main machine consists of a screen, CPU and printer. It only prints ballots, and doesn't count anything. Ballots are printed in a human and computer readable format, in an easy to OCR font. No barcodes or anything hidden. Perhaps in different ink colors to make manual sorting easier.
Machine prints ballot and shows it to the voter. Voter approves or discards it.
Ballot is fed into an optical scanner, which scans it. Scanner is implemented as absolutely simply as possible, by for example measuring levels of reflected light. No software.
Both the machine printing the vote and the scanner transmit their results to a comparator. This would be implemented in very simple electronics -- resistors, capacitors, and standard chips implementing logical functions. No custom components, or anything capable of running any sort of software. Comparator compares what the terminal said it printed, and what the scanner said it scanned. The result makes a simple mechanical component move (with a magnet for instance) so that the ballot is either stored or discarded. Comparator also increments a tamper-evident, mechanical counter.
Counter is built in such a way that each increment produces an audible sound, so that increments at the wrong time can be noticed.
Mechanism contains safeguards to verify that moving components actually moved to the intended position.
Interactions and interfaces between components are standarized. Each component is fabricated by a different manufacturer. Manufacturers are not notified who is working on the other parts. For best security, multiple manufacturers are asked to implement a solution, then the ones that passs the test are chosen at random.
Please, if you are a USA geek and care about the integrity of your democracy, force the public to take notice. You think they are going to care if people say that something is theoretically possible? No, they think it's a conspiracy theorist, or, at best, "The government would never let that happen, would they? I'm sure somebody is taking care of it." The only way to fix this is to make the public realise that this directly affects them. Otherwise they are too apathetic and myopic to do anything about it.
So rig the next election. And I don't mean for Mickey Mouse, that can easily be caught and covered up on the day. It has to be a landslide for a believable candidate. Write an encrypted letter to your local newspapers beforehand that explains what you are going to do and how you are going to do it. Leave a marker on the system to prove that you were there, and mention it in the letter. After the election, send them the key that decrypts the letter, proving that the recent landslide was totally rigged. For bonus points, own up to it instead of doing it anonymously, but only do this if you have an impeccable public persona. Rosa Parks wouldn't have had quite the impact she did if she dealt weed on the side.
If you don't do this, somebody less honest than you will. They may already have done it. The only people who can solve this are honest American geeks.
Those who cast the votes decide nothing; those who choose the isotopes decide everything.
Also how will you stop someone from slipping in a beryllium ballot? It won't trip the Geiger counters on the way in and in the presence of alpha radiation it fissions releasing a neutron which could disenfranchise other voters.
This is a duplicate of the (still front-page Slashdot) story posted by CowboyNeal.
Please post a story about the Secretary of State's decision restricting the use of these machines.
Stuff like this really gives me the impression that USA, involuntarily or not, acts like some sort of sandbox for the rest of the world.
Why would you ever write voting machine software in VB+MS SQL and run it on Windows? A voting machine could run on any operating system, be written in any language and use any database. It is just going to count some numbers...
There were three source code reports released -- for Diebold, Hart, and Sequoia, not just Diebold. All three systems had serious weaknesses, including viral propagation vectors. All of the reports are worth checking out.
"Pedro Sanchez" nominated and elected to the Federal Gummint.
Do you realize how many favors he would have owed me?
I would have been able to sleep with ALL of his sisters AND his mother AT THE SAME TIME.
Aw squat...
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
up fine.
Where are you planning to have a CRITICAL MASS of voters?
I think I would give your voting booth a wide berth.
I can just imagine the reporters covering the explosion. (Well some of them will be doing it from afar and claiming a victory for Al Queda.)
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
> Oddly, my state of Illinois, long known for election fraud, has paper trails
There's a reason the state is KNOWN for election fraud. With paper trails the fraud gets detected.
I fear that in Diebold heavy states the fraud won't always be so apparent. It'll just be a lot of rumor and suspicion and often dismissed as paranoia.
God damn it, I was hoping to sell my vote for a couple of bucks but now, I realize that some script kiddy is going to screw me out of even that little compensation.
Why bother even going.
So they tally way more votes that voters... Hwo gives a fuck?
It would take a revolution to make a noise in the media and you know Fox news would never run the story unless we were offering to give them video of Britney's bald head going down on the choef electoral officer.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I just wanted to point out that it spells Berkeley. Honest mistake, since it's wrong in the original post.
It is about having another revenue stream. After all, how much would either major party be willing to pay to win a governorship or a presidency? They have already shown that spending 10's of millions on a state election is nothing. Now, they can spend it and be guaranteed of having a 10-20% boost in the outcome. In a normal year, that is enough to win the election. For last year and next, it will not.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
FL, not known for election fraud because of creative media hijinks, is rife with election fraud.
in 2000, Volusia County, FL had one precinct count up (er down) -16,000 votes for Al Gore. That's Negative Sixteen Thousand.
It was allowed to pass in the final tally.
information from the blackbox voting documentary.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Maybe Slashdot should have a new political section slogan: "Politics for nerds. Your vote doesn't matter."
:^) I guess that's where the electoral college comes in. Do they use Diebold machines as well?!
On the other hand, with a screwup like this, maybe Ron Paul will get the majority of votes on election day. Or maybe a write-in candidate like Mickey Mouse will get all the votes.
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
Modded +5? Having to handle radioactive material (even the slightest amount) is a huge turn-off for people (those who believe any amount can kill you, but also those won't risk an additional 0.00001% chance of getting cancer every time they vote) - if anything we want more people to vote, not less. And then of course you place all the credibility on the military in the hopes it will guard all the radioactive material it has (as well as guard against any black import of the material), not withstanding that people in the military itself (with the right arguments) can get corrupted just as easily as anyone else.
P.S. Someone who holds their credit card number PIN or other password in their wallet is not very clever. Anyone who is able to extract it from the victim e.g. at gunpoint will be able to use it. Might even increase the chance of getting robbed if the victim can be seen peeking for the password. A better way is to store the wrong PIN in your wallet (or better the bank card itself), a PIN that can be read upside down as well. The thief will try it out, flip it over, try it out again and then try to punch it in a third time assuming he made a mistake the first two times - voila: card gets blocked and the thief is out in the dark.
And when you gaze long enough into the code, the code will also gaze into you.
god help the future of democracy.
I had to correct this because "Democracy is defined as 51 percent of the populous telling the other 49 percent what to do." - Thomas Jefferson
That is why we have a REPUBLIC.
It should read "god help the future of our republic."
It was once stated that "Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what is for dinner. Liberty is a well armed lamb contesting the vote." - Benjamin Franklin
When government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. - Jefferson
I cannot see WHY they feel they have to network them to accumulate the results. Best way to propagate a virus: wire them all together (or, worse, through the internet - however "secure" the connection).
I still can't see anything wrong with using the machines to accumulate the votes and then polling each machine, by hand, to copy the tallies - having enough witnesses from all parties will keep the results accurate and they can still be communicated to the appropriate location as they've always been.
I thought the main purpose of new machines over the older mechanical ones was the reduction of complexity of the machines (hence increasing their reliability), accessibility by the handicapped, and ease of recounting (just run the forms through another scanner and see if they total identically) - at least that's the line parroted by our idiot secretary of state (bysiewicz, Connecticut).
It's obvious that machines wired to each other can be more completely tampered-with than individual machines, SO WHY DO IT?
"It's time to take life by the cans." ~ Bender ("Bendin' in the Wind", ep. 3-13)
Just how much money is involved in evaluating, buying, deploying and now investigating these machines ?
The main reason cited for moving to electronic voting is that manual counting methods are too slow or inacurate.
My own hunch would be that if we took even half the ammount of money that has been wasted on these machines and spent it on researching ways to improve the speed and accuracy of the existing manual counting methods, we would have a better system that would be both secure and clear for everyone to understand.
Yes, we know the Diebold machines are running WinCE, the program is either VB or VC++ and the database is access.
Yet I can't help but wonder. If I gave my truck to a bunch of high school students, locked them in the gargage with it for a week, could they possibly break into it?
Get real, folks. My only question is to when DES gets out of that market. It is only like 2% of their business...
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
Clean the rolls, and I bet 99% of all "election fraud" issues go away... I'd say force everyone to reregister, nation-wide. Proof of citizenship and proof of residence must be provided, or you don't get to register. Provisional ballots? Throw them out... Mail in ballots? Unless you're physically incapable of making it to the polls (medical condition or overseas), you gotta get your butt down to the polling station - no mail in ballots for you. And you have to provide proof of identity at least as good as if cashing a check at a bank - two pieces of ID, please.
The power of the vote is one of the most important powers that citizens have. It should be protected and cared for at least as vigorously as the Bill of Rights. The fact so many scream about supposed infringement of their "rights" but are lackluster at best towards voting is truly the scary part...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
The follow is a list of attacks or hacks which the Diebold machines are known to be vulerable to:
Sneezing in their vicinity,
Looking at them cross eyed,
Armpit farts,
Dancing counterclockwise around them,
Voting,
Sarcastic comments,
Pixie dust,
My mother-in-law's meatloaf, and
Bad Bob Dylan cover songs.
Seriously, several years ago three or four different versions of the GEMS software (that's the name of the Diebold voting software) were available for download in a few places on the internet. Accessing the voting database was a simple as creating a new database and copying the password you created over to the voting database. The security log didn't have sequentially numbered entries so deleting your tracks was as simple as opening the log and deleting the pertinent lines. With ZERO experience with Access, and a single page of written instructions I was able to break in, alter voting data (on my PC not a real election PC!), and cover my tracks within just a few hours of installing the software. These machines are set to autorun anything that is inserted in the PC card slot!!! PC cards are what are used to carry vote data from the precincts to the central tabulator so dozens of cards are typically inserted in the central tabulator on election night. Fixing an election is as simple as writing a script on a PC card and inserting it in the PC card of the central tabulator. It's not far fetched either. Unidentified people have been seen fiddling with the central tabulators in several counties in elections when there were surprising results. My conclusion was not that these machines were badly designed, but that they were well designed for the purpose of enabling election fixing.
-- QED
The real risk is insiders: the programmers, the maintenance people, the random IT person, the technicians.
Bev Harris - founder, Black Box Voting
The flaw needs to be hacked in a 'live run' situation to generate critical awareness amongst the public. Sure it won't be legal, but it's a necessary evil to point out what is completely wrong with the system. I suggest that the votes be rigged in favor of well known fictional characters. I wonder what would happen if an election suddenly had Kermit D. Frog, Mickey Mouse, and Optimus Prime as the leading candidates?
Of course the problem is obvious to most tech-savvy types, but until there's a demonstration of the exploit the general public will remain as ignorant as ever.
The REAL problem, is that the ruling elite does not want fair elections,
so they put on this "dog and pony show" with Diebold to pull the wool over the American public's eyes. Think about what would happen with fair elections, when (in less than 5 years), hordes of poor immigrants will outnumber the middle-class and the upper class. Viva Chavez...... that's what will happen. So we can expect the next elections to be rigged...... they will make it look good, all the pundits will explain it away, like the 2 recent fraudulent Bush(I mean Cheney) victories. Clearly they lost, there was precinct fraud everywhere....but somehow they won.
It's "BerkelEy", DIPSHIT.
Diebold get the bad press because the company president publicly announced that he was going to steal the election. There's no evidence that any of the other machines are any more honest. They're a bit more discrete, however.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Here's mine:
Multiple choice fill in the dots just like I used in highschool. (Are they called "Scantron" sheets?) The difference is, instead of filling in the dots with pencil, you use bingo markers. Indelible. And you sign your ballot after you fill it in. Then the polling official signs the back of the sheet as they accept it (folded in half appox. along a pre-marked line). And each ballot is stamped twice with a number identifying the polling place and the sequence of issue. (One of them is on the tear-off receipt that you take as your "this is my ballot" receipt.) The numbers are in blue and the bingo marker is black. The numbers are on the other side of the sheet of paper from the rest of the ballot.
As with your system, the ballot is scanned with a simple scanner. You use the kind that IBM invented to score high school exams, or a modern descendant that's just as simple.
You've got:
1) Simple
2) Cheap
3) Paper trail
4) Anonymity
5) Reliable
6) Fast
7) Verifiable (see 1, 3 and 5)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Leave us not forget that all the potential competitors got cracked as well.
The only system in which the public should have any confidence at all would
have to open source. Until such time as that occurs paper ballots could
carry the load.
And there'd be less whining from Dhimmicreeps since they are old hands at
perverting that system.