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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."
the election board had the common sense to ask for this publicly and not cross their fingers and hope no one did this when they used it for real. More gov't entities should open up to testing like this.
Why not Zoidberg?
If elected I promise to KILL ALL HUMANS! Hey, you said there'd be hookers at this convention.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
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?
"Have you ever tried simply turning off the TV, sitting down with your children, and hitting them?"
Everything I say is a lie. Except that... and that... and that, and that, and that, and that... and that.
Ruby on Rails
And there's your problem. Only an idiot would try to run something that needs high security on Ruby on Fails. Rubyists couldn't write secure code if their life depended on it. Next time hire real programmers not hipsters who spend all day sipping lattes and admiring each other's new pair of skinny jeans.
Ya, well, I'm gonna go build my own election system. With blackjack! And hookers!
In fact, forget the election system.
Every single technology profession I have EVER communicated with, does not think electronic voting machines are a good idea. If EVERYONE is in agreement this is a BAD idea, why the FUCK are we still making these things?
What I want to see is a real compromise of one of these systems that can be held up as a true scare story:
1. The compromise is undetected. At the time the results are reported, the election officials are unaware that the system has been compromised and none of the systems in place for detecting a compromise has indicated any trouble. According to all evidence in the audit trail the results are undeniably correct and true.
2. There was no indication of tampering at the time of voting. As votes were being cast there was no indication of tampering with the ballots or any other visible indication that the results weren't being correctly recorded and reported.
3. The results reported are undeniably wrong. Eg., the test voting was done in a controlled manner where everyone knew what the correct results should be and that everyone saw that everyone else had voted the way they were supposed to, so if the system functioned correctly it's known exactly how many votes should be cast for which candidate.
4. The reported results are undeniably wrong. Eg., according to the reported results 100% of the votes cast were for a candidate who should've received zero votes.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
wha...?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
It's not news that electronic systems can be insecure. Those selecting such systems are certainly lobbied to believe that, whatever system they choose, "this time it will be different... this one IS secure."
The truth is all voting systems -- manually or electronically administered -- are insecure. The feature that traditionally manual voting systems have is that the scale of voting fraud exacted is correlated with the scale of corrupt election officials overseeing the process. To increase fraud you either need a) more conspirators or b) higher-level conspirators in the body that oversees the process. That is a feature that is worth keeping in any new version of voting system.
This article is just another example of a voting system that has given up the feature. Not all electronic voting systems forsake this feature, but those that keep it are at most electronic-assisted voting systems that retain distributed verification at multiple stages of the counting process. That's because voting is most secure when it's a distributed activity, not a centralized one. With thousands of tiny precincts collecting pockets of votes, any one could tamper with results -- but many would have to tamper to have a big impact. Election commissioners, keep this feature!
"Every single technology profession I have EVER communicated with, does not think electronic voting machines are a good idea." Three cheers, too, for superstitious luddites (see below). Here are my top three solutions to computer fraud and f**kups:
1. Wanted posters and long prison sentences. Rob a mail truck, do time. Why should this not work for email and other electronic fraud? Robbing an election is a more serious a threat to democracy than robbing the mails, which is bad enough.
2. Human signatures and carbon paper (or one-write NCR paper). When a live person signs a check, an invoice, a purchase order or a ballot, he or she thinks twice about the consequences. Anything can be faked, but carbon paper scores high on lie-detector tests.
3. Letterpress-imprinted sequential numbering. Paper forms, including ballots, with unique numbers and carbons copies, are a solid control for electronic databases.Ancient Letterpress lead-type numbering devices--stamp, crunch, print, and advance the counter-- are older and less screwable-with than computerized typesetting or laser-printing.
I use all of these systems in my own business because where my money is concerned, I do not entirely trust any computer system. I've seen an entire business of 100+ employees saved by one persnicketly accounting clerk who kept paper copies of all the invoices and payments. She had been ordered not to--don't be so old-fashioned, dear--but ignored the controller's blind faith in his new, shiny, $200K fail-safe automated system. No hacker except Murphy and his law was involved. She was neither thanked nor rewarded for rescuing her employer from catastrophic folly.
Murphy's corollary: no good deed goes unpunished.
Because "Insightful" is Secret Slashdot Code for "Funny, but enough so it deserves karma". And "Funny" is Secret Slashdot Code for "So painfully unfunny it induces groaning."
Or possibly Groening. Not precisely clear on that.
That is incorrect. I am a poll worker in Virginia, and we follow a very similar protocol for our DRE voting machines. We run the machines through a double-blind test prior to the vote, under the observation of multiple parties, and then we seal them. During the vote, the machines are kept in the open and observed by multiple parties. Each hour, the total votes cast are compared to the total voters allowed into the polling place, and the results called in my phone, and independently recorded, by the Registrar. At the end of the voting day, the vote totals are printed on paper, called into the Registrar by phone, and then aggregated by the State Board of Election. We then transfer the totals in ink onto a separate report, make a backup copy of the database, seal our report and the machines, and deliver them to the Registrar. The sealed reports and backup data go to the local courthouse, where they are locked away until the vote is certified.
In order to defeat our system, you would have to do it in the open, under the (very) watchful gaze of multiple parties both partisan and neutral, and you would have to do it in a way that did not change the total number of votes cast. I'm not saying it's impossible, but it would be really, really hard.
I have been volunteering for many years, know a thing or two about machine security, and am very confident that we run a clean, fair, and open election with results that are far better than a paper ballot count. If I had a choice between a paper and a machine/electronic balloting process, I would never choose to use paper. Paper is an awful medium for counting. You may have noticed that places where counting is important -- like banks -- paper is no longer used. There's a reason for that!
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday