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US Voting Machines Cracked In 90 Minutes At DEFCON (thehill.com)
An anonymous reader quotes The Hill:
Hackers at at a competition in Las Vegas were able to successfully breach the software of U.S. voting machines in just 90 minutes on Friday, illuminating glaring security deficiencies in America's election infrastructure. Tech minds at the annual "DEF CON" in Las Vegas were given physical voting machines and remote access, with the instructions of gaining access to the software. According to a Register report, within minutes, hackers exposed glaring physical and software vulnerabilities across multiple U.S. voting machine companies' products. Some devices were found to have physical ports that could be used to attach devices containing malicious software. Others had insecure Wi-Fi connections, or were running outdated software with security vulnerabilities like Windows XP.
Though some of the machines were out of date, they were all from "major U.S. voting machine companies" like Diebold Nixorf, Sequoia Voting Systems, and WinVote -- and were purchased on eBay or at government auctions. One of the machines apparently still had voter registration data stored in plain text in an SQLite database from a 2008 election, according to event's official Twitter feed.
By Saturday night they were tweeting video of a WinVote machine playing Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up."
Though some of the machines were out of date, they were all from "major U.S. voting machine companies" like Diebold Nixorf, Sequoia Voting Systems, and WinVote -- and were purchased on eBay or at government auctions. One of the machines apparently still had voter registration data stored in plain text in an SQLite database from a 2008 election, according to event's official Twitter feed.
By Saturday night they were tweeting video of a WinVote machine playing Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up."
In Virginia these machines have been decertified. I imagine other states have acted as well.
slashdot: A failed experiment.
after dropped from the delivery truck
By Saturday night they were tweeting video of a WinVote machine playing Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up."
So, you're saying America got Rick Rolled on November 8th, 2016.
Explains a lot.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
Physical ballots are still the best way to do it. The added confidence and security is WELL worth it.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Where is the Putin/Trump cyber security task force when you need it!?!?!?!
Did you hear of the IT guy (paid millions) just arrested fleeing to Pakistan? Apparently he worked for Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the same DNC bitch that stole election from Bernie.. Why was some random guy making millions? Was he hacking the voter machines?
DWS even threatened a DC Capitol police chief from investigating that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAAhMVoeCYg
How that her henchman is finally arrested, guess who got his case? Assistant attorney that just happens to be DWS's brother! You can't make this shit up: http://www.hannity.com/content/2017-07-27-conflict-of-interest-dws-brother-works-in-us-attorneys-dc-office/
Demonrats are corrupt to the bone. DNC needs to be investigated, indicted, tried, and locked up. Democrats need to be investigated under RICO.
DNC goose is cooked. Here is the DNC special prosecutor appointment request from Congress. Check out the last page for signatures.
If you've worked as a programmer, you know this already.
When someone tells you they want it done by a deadline and they won't hire people who are good at security because they're expensive, instead scowling and saying "you programmers need to make it secure on top of everything else!" what do you think will happen?
It's dangerous to think you have the obvious right answer, there are problems with all the obvious solutions.
In your case, the problem is it doesn't allow anonymous voting, which is a requirement for democracy. There are many examples for how non-anonymous voting can be abused, from vote-buying, to putting enemies on a watch list, to outright killing those who voted for the wrong person.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Voters receive their paper ballots about a month in advance. They can either fill it out and put it in the mail, or wait until the last minute and drop it off at any library or county clerk's office (think traffic court). All ballots must be in an envelope signed by the voter or it doesn't count. The county registrar has people trained to check signatures as they come in. If there is a mismatch, they contact the voter when there is time (sometimes older people, or those who have health issues, have shakier handwriting), and the voter can come down to straighten it out.
The ballots are then put in bins, which are then tabulated (for cost efficiency) by high speed vote counting machines on election night. The machines are certified, tested with special ballot runs to make sure they're working correctly, and are not hooked up to the internet. And to the best of my understanding, don't even have any external interfaces.
The paper ballots are never thrown away, in case there is a challenge. If the vote is very close, a recount is done automatically by hand. If not, the losing side can pay to have the recount done. All these processes are open to the public and are typically overseen by everyone from the most kook teabagger to the greenest of pretending-not-to-be-communist green.
About eight years ago, on a special election night in Tillamook, there was a terrible winter storm. The main highway was quite literally flooded by 5 feet of water. Despite this, there was an over 80% turnout. Everyone had mailed in their ballots long before.
Democrats love the system. Rural Republicans especially love the system. It's secure. Almost impossible to pull dirty tricks with. Basically impossible to hack. And best of all - cheap. Seriously. Because it reuses the US post system and libraries, there is no need to organize election stations, monitors, volunteers, reserve space for people to vote. It's nearly half the cost of all other systems.
That is nobody that followed the developments for the last 10 years or so. Of course, the actual experts have been warning of this far longer, but who in politics listens to mere experts. Pathetic.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
They were probably not in best shape
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
So someone lied and tweeted that they opened mail and ripped up votes, and then the post office confirmed that the person has never worked there.
Not really the best counter argument - though obviously there needs to be a lot of monitoring at each stage of handling the vote, just like there has to be that during more traditional voting.
It's turtles all the way down.
It is possible to assess and address corruption and fraud across multiple different communities and individuals at the same time.
I suspect the FBI is large enough to manage two concurrent investigations.
Demand that any electronic voting machine survive two days taking votes on something important (e.g. M&Ms vs Skittles) at DefCon before it can be used in an election.
It's free pen testing, what's not to like?
Physical Voting Machines means they had physical access.
Yeah. Those weird old League of Womens Voters people who volunteer to hang out at the polling places are gonna look at trenchcoat dude and not be suspicious. Right.
Problems with this system:
1) No secret ballot
2) Signatures are easily faked
The root problem with voting systems is that, fundamentally, they can only be as reliable as the people who operate them. If those people really honestly want to conduct fair, unbiased, honest elections then, on the whole, that is what will ensue. There may be glitches and little pockets of unfairness, but if the people who vote AND the people who run the system all want an honest result, they will get one.
The trouble arises when a critical fraction of those involved in running an election do not want an honest outcome. Frankly, there are so many ways of cheating that it would be tedious to list them. Just imagine what a highly-trained, experienced security specialist would make of any democratic voting system. They are so full of holes that there are more holes than solid material.
Sure, voting machines can be hacked. But if you run a system without any machine more complicated than a pencil, there are still ample opportunities for massive cheating. Anyone familiar with the history of elections could write down dozens of examples. As one of the most often-quoted remarks on the subject tells us, it's not who votes that counts - it's who counts the votes. (And who look after the actual ballots in the long watches of the night, and who has control of the totals once they have been written down).
The situation is just the same as with the US Constitution. Admirable in principle, well-intentioned, and carefully designed to preserve freedoms. But... no piece of paper, in and of itself, can stop people doing bad things. That's obvious. So the missing piece of the puzzle must be that the people who rule choose to act in accordance with the piece of paper. For years now, they haven't.
In a country where the Supreme Court can solemnly declare that bribery is free speech, and that corporations are people, no statement or declaration of principle is safe. Powerful people can simply "interpret" it to mean something entirely different.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
Nicely ironical. Just like when John McCain rants his mouth about "attack on U.S. democracy" whilst busy setting-up quick appointments with well-known ISIS and other middle-eastern terrorists.
LOL, all electronic voting systems have central tabulators which are inherently insecure. There is no way to make electronic voting secure without a blockchain.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI
>80 column hard wrapped e-mail is not a sign of intelligent
>life
Why are voting machine even allowed to be sold on Ebay? Can I buy a used money making machine too?
It sounds like the best system.... for party operatives to drive around and steal ballots out of selected mailboxes or neighborhoods.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
My apologies i read your comment more carefully- stealing ballots would require the collusion of the registrar. How honest are these people?
Considering the Democrats went on a campaign to capture secretary of state seats so they could put their thumb on the scales at that level, a few dirty registrars aren't out of the question.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
Just think how much money states spent on these machines that were built by companies that are far too close to the Republican party. Send all these electronic machines back to the vendors for a full refund and user paper ballots and a pen. Keep it simple, verifiable, and quite secure. Sure, it will take longer to count the votes, but I rather wait a day and get results anyone can trust than get results in an hour and question for years if they were accurate.
Not any worse than all the other approaches. Around here they do not even make one sign anything. You go to the polling place, tell them your name and address, they look it up in the list, and if it is on the list you get to vote...and just maybe they cross off the right name. Just be faster to the poll station than the folks across town that you can look up in the phone book.
That fine and dandy, but as I just said elsewhere: Unless you can trust the entire chain of custody of the aforementioned paper ballots, from end-to-end, it's useless. If someone wants to destroy, alter, or replace ballots, then it's useless.
Until you get that one house with 83 ballots - all with different names - mailed to it. Or you get those Democratic elected officials "finding" more votes after the election and you count them anyway, overturning a Gubernatorial election... And of course - no way to prove who actually cast the ballot because there is ZERO identification required (you know, like Canada , Germany, the Netherlands, the UK, and most of the rest of the world requires).
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
But these machines were used prior to the 2016 election, they were bought on eBay. They were used for the previous elections, so...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
When I show up with ID and my name is already crossed off on the ballot, I can challenge it and make an accusation of fraud.
When I mail in my vote, I can sell it, or be coerced into "selling" it, and send it in with someone looking over my shoulder to make sure I "fill it in right".
These are not nearly the same failure mechanism.
The former only succeeds if a small fraction of people bother to vote (which is another reason to give people shit for not voting), and requires a large number of people to engage in the fraud.
The latter succeeds if the criminal is sufficiently criminal, and it requires a large number of people to root it out.
Mail-in ballots should be declared, at a federal level, compromised, and considered invalid in any federal election. (And, as TFA shows, the same for all-electronic voting machines. If a vote comes from a voting machine, deem it invalid, throw it out, and move on.)
Just because paper ballots aren't immune to tampering doesn't mean they're anywhere near as bad as electronic voting machines.
It is much harder to rig paper ballots *on a massive widespread scale* compared to electronic voting. Period.
Yes, that's the whole point. With paper ballots, the count can physically be observed IN PUBLIC by as many parties as are interested.
A number of years ago, Germany's highest court found that:
Smart people.
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
...Just be faster to the poll station than the folks across town that you can look up in the phone book.
In small towns the poll worker knows everyone by sight, so that kind of fraud is not possible.
Seriously, why should these voting machines be accessable remotely? Private network, machines talk locally, no WiFi, and all ethernet ports should be locked down. The information can then be uploaded via a manual process, data pull every 30 minutes or something, and then uploaded, again via a closed and secured connection. Local network not being connected to the Internet means any hacking would have to be done locally, local numbers can be verified as well as what was uploaded at each interval. The only thing to be concerned with then, is if individual voting machines are properly counting votes(a printout and display of what a voter voted for SHOULD be shown, just saying, "We have your vote" gives reason to doubt if a vote was properly counted...for all people know, you vote one way, and votes are randomly given to other people if an electronic system does not display who it thinks you have voted for.
We should go back to paper as well.
The votes can be altered by any election official. Some voting machines even had an adjust votes.
Paper ballots are even worse UNLESS they are properly scrutineered. In the US, they are counted in secret rooms and nobody is allowed in. And there are strict laws to prevent any recounts or external scrutiny.
Republicans seem to be better at hacking elections than Democrats.
In civilized countries, like Australia, the votes are counted in front of scrutineers appointed by the candidates. All done in a couple of hours on election night. Very efficient, cheaper than voting machines, and impossible to hack.