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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!
The even scarier part is that the Diebold machines have not been decertified.
The revolution will be mocked
I would assume that these viral vulnerabilities are the contents of... Additional reports [which] will be made available as the Secretary of State determines that they do not inadvertently disclose security-sensitive information. ...as mentioned in the previous article about California auditing the machines.
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Toro
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.)
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?
"If I ever wanted to commit fraud in the election system, I would have. And that would not need to involve hacking a machine"
The catch is, the fraud that you would be committing (registering as a non-citizen) would only affect the election by at most 1 vote, and that single vote is quite unlikely to change the election.
The danger in using insecure voting machines is that a single fraudster can swing an election by many votes, making it much more likely that their intervention affected the final outcome.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
This is true.
However, I think self-redacting/auto-revising article text is a bad idea. Have you ever lurked on (for example) the Associated Press feed and watch an article headline slowly morph from "Bush puts off decision" to "Bush faces tough decision" and finally end up as "Bush makes decision" while the text, in which he clearly puts off the decision, stays static? I have. Or worse yet, both the headline and the body texts change according to an agenda.
There is pressure being brought on news agencies to make those changes, which are becoming commonplace. This is the danger of Internet publication in the information age. It becomes unreliable. It's too easy to change it.
So I prefer a news feed to retain previous revisions so I can get a good idea of the reliability of the news source. If there's an update, I expect it to be published as a separate note, not superseding the article text in place. I expect the act of publication to have permanent consequences, not be an act that you can wash away with something more responsible at a later date.
My expectation, of course, is not realistic. It is borne of growing up with a print media. The only logical expectation is that Internet publication will be abused, and that "print media" is now less reliable, because it is no longer in print. I only ask that you understand the consequences of your demand that Slashdot "clean up" their articles. Your desire for "clean" can rapidly turn into an engine for censorship and yellow journalism.
I can assure you of one thing: that CowboyNeal's article will fall off the bottom of the page soon enough, and you can then feel at ease.
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Toro
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)
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