Slashdot Mirror
Voting System Test Hack Elects Futurama's Bender To School Board
mr crypto writes with this quote from El Reg:
"In 2010 the Washington DC election board announced it had set up an e-voting system for absentee ballots and was planning to use it in an election. However, to test the system, it invited the security community and members of the public to try and hack it three weeks before the election. 'It was too good an opportunity to pass up,' explained Professor Alex Halderman from the University of Michigan. 'How often do you get the chance to hack a government network without the possibility of going to jail?' With the help of two graduate students, Halderman started to examine the software. Despite it being a relatively clean Ruby on Rails build, they spotted a shell injection vulnerability within a few hours. They figured out a way of writing output to the images directory (PDF) on the compromised server, and of encrypting traffic so that the front-end intrusion detection system couldn't spot them. The team also managed to guess the login details for the terminal server used by the voting system. ... The team altered all the ballots on the system to vote for none of the nominated candidates. They then wrote in names of fictional IT systems as candidates, including Skynet and (Halderman's personal favorite) Bender for head of the DC school board."
If you read the article, they didn't even have to guess really. The default root password for the HTTP admin interface was left intact. They then downloaded the etc/passwd file and cracked it in only 3.5 hours because, surprise surprise, the secondary administrator password was piss poor "cisco123"
Seriously. Who hired these clowns?
The protocol for a proper paper ballot vote is not vulnerable in that way. It goes like this:
On the morning of the election day, observers of all parties and interested citizens witness the sealing of empty ballot boxes. The ballot boxes don't leave the room, and enough observers to prevent collusion must be present at all times.
The election is carried out with observers of all parties watching to confirm that only people eligible to vote put one ballot each into the ballot box.
At the end of the day, the ballots are counted under the eyes of observers of all parties. The result is signed by all observers, each observer makes a note of the result and the signed result is posted locally. The result is relayed upward, where all local results are posted again together with the aggregate result.
This protocol ensures that no single entity can change a number without other interested parties having the opportunity to notice the manipulation.
This protocol is simple enough that no expertise is necessary to memorize it, understand why it works, and verify that it is followed correctly. It is the only protocol with these important properties.