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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 ...'"
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.
the point here is that polling places can rig the machines just fine.
clever in key areas where a specific political party needs more votes to win.
kinda like how with diebold, republicans got overwhelming victories in predominantly democratic voting districts.
Operators of the machines have to let inspectors validate the checksums on demand, and if it doesn't match then your gaming license gets revoked and the place closes down.
And how to you suggest to apply that system on an election environment? If the checksum doesn't match, you remove all votes from the voters who used that particular machine? You repeat the elections until no machine was tampered with?
You promote the death penalty in a situation where it is even more despicable then usual, especially since anyone can see the clear option to cheat by getting your opponent eliminated. Each election has some irregularities (and I assume most are not sanctioned by the candidates themselves) so it would be far too easy to cheat for the other guy while collecting 'evidence'.
Please understand that I think the undermining of the democratic process is a crime which should carry a special sentence, but more along the lines that you can't run for office for X years (like any felon I believe). But the problem is always the same: the cheater won and is now in charge.
I think the only way to guarantee a cheater free process is by completely making every step of the process transparent. Coincidentally it's the technology currently used to cheat that can be put to use to prevent it. The only problem is there is always one or more black-box-systems between the voter and the results, so there is no way to guarantee it unless we remove every black-box step. Here is my solution to make the process as open as possible:
- Generate a unique key per voter and store on a single offline drive.
- Print voter registration cards with each key used once (we know every voter can vote exactly once).
- Generate a strong encryption certificate that is only valid around election day for HTTPS use.
- Voters can choose to vote at home (but they need a separate online ID) or at a registered voting location (and show their ID), but the process is the same.
- To vote at home you can use the supplied voting live-CD or use your own (it's recommended instead of your default OS), or use the kiosks supplied at voting locations.
- The voting consists of going to the voting website, verifying the origin of the site and after that select a candidate and enter the key to store the vote.
- These votes are stored on the same 'offline' drive that is currently online only with a serial cable connected to the webserver.
- The drive containing the votes as well as the server(s) that serves the website are on public display and the code is all opened to public scrutiny.
- The server should be behind a firewall that specifically looks for any and all attacks (it should be fairly easy if you tightly define only the packets that may get trough), if there is any reason to doubt the results because of a possible breach we will know.
- The results as well as the timeline of the votes is made public from the start, when the voting closes the results are known *immediately*.
Before talking about how insecure the web is please note that this problem is known and well understood, so we have know what to harden the system against attacks... The current voting solutions are much worse in my opinion since there are attack vectors too, but we do not know how many and how bad, and even worse: we have no idea how often these are already exploited. But we do know for a fact that paper elections have been rigged (despite the rules), electronic voting machines have been tampered with and even something as simple as denying people the right to vote (sending people away who stand in line for hours). These non-tech exploits are used regularly and should not be forgotten... I'd say a web-voting is the lesser of two possible evils. Especially since the technical requirements of such a system are known. If fucking soda companies can print unique codes on the inside of the bottles and phone operators use codes for prepaid cards i'd say we should be able to make it work for something important.
I posit that for every argument against such a system slashdot's finest geeks will come up with a solution...