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Hackers Fail To Crack Brazilian Voting Machines
blueser writes "From Nov 10th to Nov 13th the Brazilian Government hosted a public hacking contest to test the robustness of its voting machines. 38 participants from private and public IT companies (including the Brazilian Federal Police) were divided into 9 teams, which tried several different approaches to try to tamper with the software installed on the machines, and even to physically interfere in other stages of the process. All attempts (aside from a minor one which would not compromise the overall results) failed, and observations from the participants and neutral observers will be taken into account to improve the process even further. Here is the official announcement for the contest (Google translation; Portuguese original). A summary of the results is available in the Brazilian press (original). Brazilian voting machines use Linux." US voting officials ought to be envious of their Brazilian counterparts, or ashamed, or both. Perhaps this MIT-developed cryptographic voting system offers a way forward.
...if you think the person who actually cracked it would admit it before cashing in.
Obviously this puts a lot of software produced in the US to shame.
Today it seems like it's all about selling something crappy for money in the US with an EULA where you free yourself of all responsibility.
And when someone points out the flaws the lawyers are called in to hide the fact that there is a gap that can put Grand Canyon to shame.
No wonder that the world has suffered so much malicious software.
Sure - call me a troll, but it's also an observation. Time to market is more important than quality.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Cracking contests are warning sign number 9 on Bruce Schneier's list of security snake oil warnings.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
Time to market is more important than quality.
Yeah look at Ubuntu. Every 6 months on the dot no matter what the quality.
;)
And uuh...yeah...Look at Vista. Was that 6 or 7 years to market?
Your statement doesn't hold up.
There's no place like
Is this exercise realistic given the need to protect against well hidden back doors, tampering by election officials, and sloppy procedures (like letting a vendor install uncertified patches just before an election)? They tested only a narrow range of dangers.
The right way to do something like this is at design time.
They deserve credit, though, for doing things so much better than the US.
1. How do you know that "A paper ballot vote is completely observable and does not require trust"?
2. "Electronic voting is unnecessary and undemocratic." -- There are democratic political systems and undemocratic ones. There are no such thing as "democratic" or "undemocratic" technology. Technology is neutral; it depends on who is using it and how it is used.
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
> Failure to find a flaw does not prove absence of a flaw.
And failure to find an unicorn doesn't prove absence of a unicorn. I claim that there is no flaw. It is now your job to find the flaw and prove me wrong.
> A paper ballot vote is completely observable and does not require trust.
So you think that computers can't be trusted, because you don't trust people handling them, but you can trust paper, because you trust people handling them?
Simplicity --> greater security (I'm not saying the contest measured something).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_Brazil#The_Brazilian_voting_machines
The source is available to the parties.
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
If there was a strong incentive or motive, that might have made a big difference. If all you get from success in cracking is the recognition, that won't bring in all the possible methods. OTOH, if there was a genuine and significant prize, like actually taking leadership of the country, or a billion dollars, you might find the machines can be cracked.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
"I claim that there is no flaw. It is now your job to find the flaw and prove me wrong."
Not really. It is your job to prove to me that there is no flaw. It's the same thing with a paper ballot. You still have to prove to me that there is not a flaw in the paper ballot. Of course, I can look over the ballot in all of about 15 seconds and see that it's the correct ballot. It's far harder to find a race condition in a voting machine running proprietary software that causes miscounted votes.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
How could you then verify a person's claim that their vote was changed? How do you prove that they aren't just changing their own mind at the last minute? I mean if every single vote in a voting machine was changed then you could very easily say that there was some tampering involved, but say a person tampered with many many systems across many states. And then say this person tampered with only a small percentage of votes on each machine and only to a randomly selected group of people (no connections to each other, random number of people). Then it wouldn't be apparent that there was any tampering involved, just a few people who wanted to change their vote after the fact. Just my thoughts....
they were designed under the electoral court's orders by universities and private companies. after the design was ready, the manufacturing was outsorced to several comapnies, one of them was procomp, that later was purchased by diebold.
diebold doesn't own the designs or the copyright to the software. the electoral court does. so if diebold is thinking about selling similar machines in US, they'll have to pay our govt. royalties.
What ? Me, worry ?
http://br-linux.org/2009/video-e-fotos-do-boot-do-linux-em-uma-urna-eletronica-brasileira/ (scroll down the page a bit)
According to the newspapers, the successful attempt was on the carrying bag for the media (which I assume carries the data required). It seems lack of physical security still can happen, but the media is supposedly cryptographically signed, so replacing it would be hard in any case.
How can you, personally, be sure that every vote in every ballot in the country was counted correctly? Paper votes are sensitive to "economic power" frauds. The party which can put more inspectors in the process is the one which controls the counting.
In Brazil there was a big affair in the 1982 Rio de Janeiro state governor elections, when the leftist candidate Brizola denounced an attempt to subvert the vote counting, in what became known as the "Proconsult scandal". According to Brizola's party, this fraud attempt was performed with the collusion of the right-wing media organizations, which presented fake exit polls indicating a victory for the rightist candidate.
In any major election there are many people working together and one must inevitably trust a lot of people involved in the counting. No ordinary citizen has the resources to monitor an election by himself, the support of the party is needed.
In these days, any political party should have lots of people who know and understand computing technology. It's much easier and cheaper to let a trusted team of computer experts do a thorough audit on the software than to get a large team of scrutineers to watch every little detail where a paper ballot can be defrauded.
It's funny that they'd crow about the fact that "hackers" couldn't break their security in three days. Hacking a voting machine isn't a timed athletic contest. It might take 4 days, or a week, or a year, but once it happens, the damage from a hacked election could be catastrophic for a nation.
The problem with voting machines is that somebody has to make them, usually a private company. Private companies are after profit. Profit + elections can be a disastrous combination. The effects of private money have turned the US political system into a bad joke.
The way to secure and fair elections is not through any proprietary technology, that's for sure.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The voting system has been widely accepted, due in great part to the fact that it speeds up the vote count tremendously. In the 1989 presidential election between Fernando Collor de Mello and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the vote count required nine days. In the 2002 general election, the count required less than 12 hours. In some smaller towns the election results are known minutes after the closing of the ballots.
I just don't get it. In Spain we know the results of the election with more than the 90% of votes counted at 21:00, while the election itself ends at 20:00. In an hour more or two, we got the 100% minus the postal votes. And of course our system is just the goold old ballot.
The source *is* open. Anyone from any political party or organized entity can request and have access to all source and follow all the procedures. The final binaries are signed by all interested parties as well and the system can be audited at any time. I know no system is fail proof but I believe they covered as much as they can and honestly, the paper system is also week to social pressures and bribing as well. That's the week link: people, not technology.
Scientia est Potentia
It's important to note that the prize for the winner is of just R$ 5.000, a little under $ 3.000. This certainly scared most experts away.
On a side note, you guys have just slashdotted our fucking Superior Election Court website. I hope you are happy.
More accurate: "Successful Brazilian voting machine hackers stay quiet, wait for election day."
Yeah, but what is your population? From Wikipedia, about 46M. Check Bras(z)il's: 190M. Your area? 500.000 square km, versus 8 millions and a half. And bear in mind that some of the brazilian population live in areas that only can be acessed by boat or airplane - not a big fraction, of course, but we have much bigger dispersion than Spain or any other European country.
Where is that guy who'd die defending what I had to say when I need him?
Hackers Fail To Crack Brazilian Voting Machines
Give them time, a brazilian is a lot of machines!
Ba-doom-boom-tss.
Proving the absence of something is impossible, or close to it. No matter how hard he looks and says "it still seems to be flawless", you can ALWAYS claim that there is still the possibility of a hidden flaw.
It's always the job of the person claiming the existence of something to prove it, not the other way around. If you think there is a flaw, show us your proof, or at least your reasoning. If you can't, we wont have reason to believe you.
Interesting. Sounds like you count at every polling place. Most countries don't do that. They gather the boxes up some smaller set of places (in the UK it's one per constituency) and count them all there. Obvious advantage -- much easier for parties and the press to scrutinise the count; obvious disadvantage -- it takes longer.
In the US they also have a curious attachment to having huge numbers of elections all at once and putting them all on the same piece of paper. I guess this probably is easier for the voters, at least in the sense of being less work, but it means that hand counting would be infernally complicated because the same ballot papers need to be counted in multiple different ways for everything from president of the USA to town dogcatcher.
Anyone can understand how this process works, and can observe it in full (except for the actual point when the voter marks their ballot paper, since it's a secret ballot.) And here in the UK, there are observers throughout, not least from the various political parties (each of whom has an interest in ensuring that there isn't any fraud being committed against them) and the media. And if there's a dispute about the result, the counting can be easily verified.
Compare this to using an electronic voting machine:
(I have deliberately left out how the votes are actually counted, as I'm not familiar with the actual systems in use, and (more importantly) this is how it will appear to most voters - as a magic box that takes their selections as an input and spits out a result as the output, with no understanding of how it does that.)
In this system the vast majority of the electorate will have no understanding of how it works, and nobody can observe the actual counting, they are reliant on techies checking the machines and saying "yes, this works properly." And if there is a dispute about whether the machines have counted the votes properly, there is no way to do a recount to verify the result. (I am deliberately ignoring electronic voting machines which produce a paper receipt, because in the event of a dispute the receipts can be counted - the machine is there just providing a faster method of counting.)
The first step to transparency is for people to be able to understand how the system is meant to work, only then can you move on to confirming that the system does work as it is meant to. Do you see now why paper voting is more transparent that electronic voting?
First, is not the Brazilian goverment but the Tribunal Superior Eleitoral (supreme election jury or something like this in English).
And all the test is a ugly lie.
The... "hackers" are public workers, not really hackers. And they are forbidden to use really "hacker" methods like disassemblers, sniffers and etcetera, only the "approved" methods. Is like you ask to a thief to try to bypass your security system, but allows then to use only a paper clip. Ridiculous, but the TSE do not care.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time