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Researchers Demo Hardware Attacks Against India's E-Voting Machines
An anonymous reader writes "India, the world's largest democracy, votes entirely on government-made electronic voting machines that authorities claim are 'tamperproof,' 'infallible,' and 'perfect,' but last week security researchers proved that they can be manipulated to steal elections. A team led by Hari Prasad, Professor J. Alex Halderman, and Rop Gonggrijp released an awesome video that shows off hardware hacks they built. These machines are much simpler than e-voting designs used in the US, but as the research paper explains, this makes attacking the hardware even easier. Halderman's students at the University of Michigan took only about a week to build a replacement display board that lies about the vote totals, and the team also built a pocket-sized device that clips onto the memory chips, with the machine powered on, and rewrites the votes. Clippy says, 'It looks like you're trying to rig an election ...'"
Oh, sorry, "Premier Election Solutions"...
you had me at #!
...would register a one-issue party against the use of insecure voting machines. Then win the election. Then fix the problem.
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
Whilst technically possible, I can't see a secure e-voting system ever being created.
Still, the current crop seem beyond incompetent. I've seen better security in gaming anti-cheat technology.
Any security professional, IT or otherwise, who ever says "impossible to break" in any of its forms, should be directly fired.
No discussion. No explanations. You blabber idiocies about your supposed area of expertise, you're fired.
Maybe it is time for a new law: You cheat, you die.
Imagine that a party leader becomes responsible for the actions of the members of his party. Some lowly member cheats, the leader gets a bullet in the head.
Open for abuse to be sure but all our leaders claim we should trust the system so surely they trust it?
It would motivate leaders to motivate their followers not to break the rules. Right now the system does exactly the reverse. As long as the leader isn't proven to have given the direct order in writing, he benefits. Everyone knows Bush cheated, yet he ruled unchallenged for 8 years. So cheating works right? Hard to argue this when the evidence is so clear.
We have come to take democracy for granted, but the recent problems in the UK have shown that such a basic thing as voting is not so simple after all. It is a complex process and without it working flawlessly, our entire system looses its validation. If you wanted to vote, went to vote but weren't allowed to, then how can you then be asked to support the government you didn't vote for?
How can you ask a soldier to die for a leader whose election process he didn't take part in? The entire basis of democracy is your loyalty in exchange for a say. Your money and your life for a vote. We are the subjects of an elected government and must follow its rules because we elected them, yes even if you didn't vote for them. That is the deal. Cheating breaks that deal.
It is hard to argue that people shouldn't go for a nasty dictator type, when the democracy isn't letting them have their say either. If you are not being listened to, you might as well have someone competent in charge instead of the monkey that cheated in a popularity contest.
So lets stick with paper and enforce extreme and rigid rules about how those papers and handled and counted and put severe penalties on anyone who messed with it. And before you say that death is far so serious. Treason still carries a death sentence in many nations, and cheating in elections is treason against nation as a whole.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Amazing work they've done here. They've proven that if you have intrusive access to the hardware, you can screw it up and do deviant shit. How about you post an article when someone can walk into a polling place, hack a machine, and walk out without take a screwdriver or some large, obvious device to a voting machine?
This article, like most of the front page needs "-1, Irrelevant".
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Paper votes are subject to impersonation, for example, especially if voter turnout is low. During canvassing for the recent UK General Election for example, I became aware of people who were not voting due to absence (and hadn't secured a postal vote). It would have been simple to use those votes if I was so inclined.
The only solutions are transparent voting systems (if electronic, software and hardware must be publicly documented so that flaws are found and fixed - yes, I user Firefox!), plus independent audit trails (say, issue each voter with a receipt that can be checked against the voting record, if they agree).
The inconvenience of paper voting (many hundreds of people couldn't vote in the UK due to various issues related to this, and unexpected voter turnout) will push us towards electronic, probably internet voting whether we like it or not. The real question is not are these systems acceptably fraud resistant, but how to make them so.
I have to wonder just what sort of effect this would have on an AMERICAN election...oh wait, I already know. ;p
We are more sophisticated. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booth_capturing
Perfectly illustrated in http://xkcd.com/538/
Today, May 10, the Philippines is holding the presidential, legislative and local elections. It is the first time electronic voting machines are being used. I am wondering if the machines used are similar models as the ones being discussed in this article.
If they've proved that someone can clip a device over a RAM chip, may I suggest epoxy resin or a potting compound. Pot the entire internals, including the ribbon cable to the display and the display board itself to make the electronics much, much more difficult to reach.
AT&ROFLMAO
There have been allegations in the past that political parties in India have rigged EVMs and I think that is quite likely despite the lack of "evidence". To understand that, you need to know how the voting system works in Indian elections.
The educated elite in India are apathetic to voting. They have no trust in the administrative system and have no hope that the endemic corruption will ever end. So come election time, the people who vote are mostly the poor who hope that some day, the extravagant promises made by the political parties will be kept . Before election day, the voters are bribed with free liquor and food. The women folk are given new clothes. And finally cash is also distributed to bias the voters to chose a particular candidate. The system which issues voter identification cards is broken and sometimes you can find impostors voting on behalf of actual voters.
Given the amount of money that politicians spend on rigging manual voting, tampering EVMs is just good business practice. It is cheaper and you don't need to chase around thousands of voters.
It doesn't matter much... All the political parties are the same... "chore chore mastuto bhai"
Our project team includes three Centaurs, design was managed by the Minotaur and the UI was put together by a herd of Unicorns. Debugging was handled by a 500 year old wise Chinese dragon.
After all, who better than a team of mythical creatures to design a system with a mythical feature-set ?
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
The size and scale of India's election makes attempts at manipulating the election at the voting machine level very difficult. Any legit attack would have to be done at the back-end altering massive numbers of votes.
The way EVMs reduce rigging is not by any superior technology. It is based on simple accessible technology and elaborate procedures to ensure that poll rigging is minimized to the maximum extent possible. Check this very detailed FAQ by Election Commission of India, specifically Q24 and Q28.
http://www.indian-elections.com/electionfaqs/electronic-voting-machines.html
<quote><p>Imagine that a party leader becomes responsible for the actions of the members of his party. Some lowly member cheats, the leader gets a bullet in the head.
</quote>
Never cheat on your own data, always rig your neighbours data.
It will still take a couple iterations, but like so many other things before, electronic voting will eventually be safer, faster and more convenient than traditional paper-based voting.
Most of us IT guys here can sure name a couple solutions to avoid the current hack and throw a few ideas for a truly 99% tamperproof system - hardware sensors, certificate-based encryption of RAM memory and storage, you name it. All these things, or similar, will eventually happen. It is unfortunate that the governments that quite bravely dare lead the path are as usual spending too much money in too unsatisfactory a solution at the moment but that is still only v0.1. When we are at v1.0, barring a few small and pintoresque bugs that reverse polling results or somesuch (and which we will be so happy to comment on /.), the days of tons of paper and boxes moving around will begin a slow but steady decline, like the long queues in the bank or in your local tax office/IRS equivalent.
even the most technologically advanced societies (some nordic countries want to vote by cell phone!?), for two reasons:
1. attack vectors
of course paper voting is subject to cheats, ballot stuffing, getting lost in transit, etc. its just that paper voting is a simpler process than mechanical or electronic voting, so therefore the numnber of attack vectors for paper voting is orders of magnitude less than mechanical voting... which in turn has orders of magnitude less attack vectors than electronic voting
one well placed dude can, in a few milliseconds, in a statistically invisible way, randomly increase votes for one candidate over the other. and i don't care how well you design electronic voting technologically, its still overseen by corruptible government bureaucrats, for which there is no technological solution
but with paper voting, the cheats you can pull off are only crude, requiring armies of cooperating conspirators... and no conspiracy of sufficient size is airtight. therefore: discoverable. a cheat by one guy or a handful is also statistically discoverable: a truck driver of vote boxes in one precinct can't lose 10,000 votes or introduce 10,000 fake ones without being noticed in an audit. and for every one of these paper balot cheats, there a simply 1,000 such variations, attack vectors, for the more complex electronic voting, and even some new and exotic methodologies. so to guard paper voting is simply an easier, less creative process. you can't outwit the committed bad guy in a complex system, but you can outman him in a crude system
2. perception
you can have all of the transparent standards for the PROFESSIONALS that you want. but for your average joe blow, the more the voting process is a black box (press keys -> sausage -> president comes out on other end) the more they are susceptible to lose confidence in the process. paper voting simply is a smaller black box. you write on a piece of paper. the papers ate stacked somewhere. some people scan or look at them if there's a problem: its all eminently comprehensible to anyone how the process works. no databases, no tcp/ ip stacks, no authentication, no encryption... no "sausage" parts that the average voter does not understand and therefore does not trust
democracy is only valid as long as it is seen a legitimate representation of the will of the people. put that legitimacy in doubt, and democracy loses all of its strengths. therefore, we should always, forever more, no matter what technological advances we experience, vote simply with paper
the problem here is technophilia: solving a simple problem in an overly complex way simply because you like the technology. electronic voting is a contrived false solution that introduces far more problems than it solves
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Last year when I voted, there were no security cameras and we weren't even frisked before voting. I went inside the booth and placed my vote. So if someone really wanted to do this, he could. It's probably only the big cities that have surveillance cameras. The place where I live (small village in south India), the voting was done in a government school building last year. In a country as corrupt as this one, you could probably even pay a small amount of money and go in as the last person to vote and do whatever you want to the device without raising any suspicion.
if what you say is true, then people can't grasp that sometimes convenience has to be sacrificed. if what you say is true, then X Factor generation is the end of democracy
it is naive to think that technology offers a better way to vote: there is no technological solution to the bribe-able government bureaucrat
therefore, you have to make the voting process as technologically crude as possible, to prevent creative ways to cheat we cannot foresee
its also a matter of trust in the system. i can trust and verify a paper and a pencil with my own eyes. i can't step into the voting booth and "look" at a tcp/ip stack and trust it
electronic voting will be the downfall of democracy
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
the hardware attacks you!
For the hardware you need:
Touchscreen with graphics chip and touchscreen controler as an input device
Receipt printer (the kind that has been used in millions of cash registers, ATMs and other devices world wide for a few decades)
Flash memory chip to hold the machine OS and the config file (which candidates are running etc). This should be the kind that when its in the machine, it cannot be written to and has to be removed to write new software or configs. This would have a difficult-to-duplicate-or-remove sticker applied with the voting machines unique serial number to ensure that it hasn't been swapped for another identical chip containing rigged software.
Thumb drive or memory card to hold the counted votes. This would also have a difficult-to-duplicate-or-remove sticker applied with the voting machines unique serial number to ensure it isn't substituted with a fake one containing a different result.
CPU (ARM of some sort would seem to make sense) to control the system with usual support items (power supply, RAM etc)
Tamper-evident case containing the hardware with more difficult-to-duplicate-or-remove stickers with the voting machines serial number covering the screw holes/case edges/etc to ensure you can tell if its been opened.
The receipt printer would be located outside of the tamper-resistant part so the roll can be replaced by poling station officials. Should a machine fail for other reasons (i.e. any reason that would require access to the hardware) that machine would be taken offline and not used for the rest of the election.
Software:
Linux kernel with drivers for the memory card reader, touchscreen, receipt printer etc. (the kernel would be specifically built for the voting machine with everything that is not required for the device such as networking removed)
Basic set of libraries (the bare minimum required to make everything work)
Custom voting machine software.
All software would be 100% open source.
Before the election, the machines are prepared by loading the correct OS and kernel along with the config file for the machine (containing the names and info for the candidates) onto the operating system chips. The operating system chip and vote counting memory card are loaded into the machine. Then the machines are verified and tested. Once they have been verified, they are sealed up and the tamper-evident stickers applied before they get shipped off to the poling booths.
When you go to vote, you pick your candidate on the screen by touching their name. Then you have to press "OK" once you are sure you clicked on the right name.
After your vote is complete, it is recorded in the file on the memory card. Also, a receipt is printed containing a machine readable bar-code corresponding to your vote plus a human readable record. This receipt is then inserted into a ballot box as you depart the polling booth. No part of the machine (receipt included) contains any record of who you are as a voter or any way to associate your vote back to you.
To count the votes, the memory cards are removed from the machines (after checking that the machine was not tampered with and that the memory card is genuine) and sent to the relavent counting office to be read and counted. Should there be a dispute, either the machine readable bar-code or the human readable record can be used as a way to count the ballots.
Maybe some of this is overkill (like labeling the chips with stickers to prevent tampering), I dont know. But when you are talking about something as critical to a free society as an election, its important to get it RIGHT.
My idea would work for any system no matter how many items are on the ballot or how many people are voting (a commonly cited downside of paper systems is that there are too many papers to count and/or too many things being voted on)
My idea wont prevent tampering (of the kind described in TFA) but it will be immediately obvious when someone has tampered with the hardware in the machine (if it works for telling Microsoft or Dell when someone has opened their PC or XBOX and voided the warranty, it should work for a voting machine, especially since getting close enough to one for long enough to fiddle with it is hard when inside a polling station.
if you had paper voting, you'd need an army of conspirators (which by nature of its size would be discovered), and an audit would discover statistical perturbations
but with electronic voting, you just bribe the right official or two, and one guy with a few milliseconds of access to the database and some crafty code can alter the votes in statistically invisible ways
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
If you still think it really matters who you vote for, then bury your head back in the sand, consume, breed, work, and die.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Usually, it's being trotten out by poor security professionals to justify not bothering because "as no system can be secure, why bother attempting to secure one?"
Jolly bloody bugger, what is going the flipping heck on here old chappie?
I guess when the real problems - massive registration fraud and block voting on the orders of local criminals - are too difficult to deal with, all you've got left is inventing wacky "10 minutes alone with a bag full of hardware" attacks that would work just as well on paper ballots, with a lot less preparation.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
So, to really steal an election, you would have to build millions of these fake devices and deliver them to the remotest of places(the only way to get to some of which is by using an elephant).
Folks,
It is important to put the size of elections in India in perspective and how they operate to understand any meaningful amount of fraud or corruption possible.
The EVMs in question are extremely simple. They only have a breakout panel with 32 buttons (expandable upto 64 buttons with an addon breakout button panel). The machine only ever knows the number of enabled buttons. The names and party symbols are affixed as paper "stickers" on the buttons.
---------------------
[B] S First Last Name
---------------------
[B] S First Last Name
------...
The order and placement of stickers on the buttons changes from constituency to constituency. The machines are sealed/unsealed in presence of at least 3 officials, though in practice, it's no less than a dozen or more, as it's a public affair and often media is present.
Some numbers (courtesy http://www.indian-elections.com/facts-figures.html):
Number of EVMs used: 1.023 million
Max candidates per EVM: 64
Max candidates in election from one constituency: 35
Total number of candidates: 5398 (India is a multi-party democracy)
Number of parties: 220
Number of registered voters: 675 million
Cost of '09 elections: Approx $2 billion
Any 'fraud' analysis needs to take the process and numbers into account. EVMs in India solve a LOT of problems with regard to elections and drastically cut down on time, effort and cost involved. There are a number of places where several miles of journey on the back of mule is needed to reach the polling booths. It's much easier to conduct an electronic poll there rather than carrying several large ballot boxes that could be snatched.
- mritunjai
You also have to figure that e-machines, being used only a couple times a year on average, have to be competitive with paper based systems as far as cost goes, while a ATM Machine has to be competitive with a teller(or three)'s salary spread over most of a decade.
Oh, and for whatever reason, Diebold didn't use the same people in the effort.
I don't read AC A human right
you seem to think i'm saying that paper voting won't have cheating. of course paper voting will have cheating. all voting systems will have some (hopefully low grade) cheating all the time, forever. there's no way around that, there's no technological fix for that
what i'm asking you to understand is that electronic voting will have cheating too, and the kind of cheating that can go on in electronic voting is far more subtle and dangerous and far more venomous of a threat to the legitimacy of indian democracy than the low grade thuggery you are referring to
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I never understand why a election should use machine to do the voting. What's wrong with a simple set of paper and stamp?
not even in a small town is it possible
you WANT representatives, you really do
in a genuine direct democracy, every little zoning board approval or budgetary line item would require your vote. you would spend all day voting. you wouldn't pay attention to the issues: you wouldn't have TIME to pay attention to the issues. you wouldn't have time to educate yourself on the issues in the amount of time possible before the vote was due. every single vote, in nauseous tedium, would require your research. you wouldn't have the time to do live in a direct democracy and still live your life. every single citizen would spend 30 hours or more a week (if they wanted their vote to be an educated one) just dealing with voting on the issues, and that's only at one level of government (local versus state versus national)
for all of the problems of representative democracy (namely, corruption), it still functions far better than this naive, laughable idea of direct democracy in a modern society
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
in fact, all of history is a process of perfecting that balance to better and better degrees, raising the bar to even better orders of perfection, and repeating the process, forever, never completely erasing graft and corruption, but getting closer and closer to something resembling acceptability, barely
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Even the writer admits that that wrench would be hard to come by for a mere $5!
All of these hacks (contrasted to Diebold hacks with rootkits and manipulation by the vendor) presume actual physical tampering - the exact same sort of physical tampering that can be done on paper ballot boxes, the same sort of physical tampering that can be observed and prevented by appropriate monitoring of every polling station by representatives of the opposed political parties, as has been done for ages already.
I regret to inform you the Election Commission is not competent to make comments on Electronic voting machines.
... enough said
" poll rigging is minimized to the maximum extent possible " is not good enough.
Perhaps you should start with reading the article and the comments by people who are exposed to "Computer security".
Let me see
Simple accessible technology == Chinese technology ?
Elaborate security procedures == Electronic Voting machines carried on Elephants
http://expressbuzz.com/Opinion/Columnists/the-most-bogus-election/71127.html
<quote><p>The way EVMs reduce rigging is not by any superior technology. It is based on simple accessible technology and elaborate procedures to ensure that poll rigging is minimized to the maximum extent possible. Check this very detailed FAQ by Election Commission of India, specifically Q24 and Q28.</p><p><a href="http://www.indian-elections.com/electionfaqs/electronic-voting-machines.html">http://www.indian-elections.com/electionfaqs/electronic-voting-machines.html</a></p></quote>
Guess the voting machines were designed by the same genius who gave the country it's most impregnable computer security for the Department of Defense. Phew I'm relived ... NOT
http://www.technomobilez.com/2009/12/11/indian-prime-minister-manmohan-singh%E2%80%99s-web-site-hacked/
http://sify.com/news/hacking-of-army-major-s-computer-is-a-cyber-security-breach-antony-news-national-kfhrOcfbdji.html