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Researchers Find Critical Backdoor In Swiss Online Voting System (vice.com)
An international group of researchers who have been examining the source code for an internet voting system that Switzerland plans to roll out this year have found a critical flaw in the code that would allow someone to alter votes without detection. New submitter eatmorekix shares a report: The cryptographic backdoor exists in a part of the system that is supposed to verify that all of the ballots and votes counted in an election are the same ones that voters cast. But the flaw could allow someone to swap out all of the legitimate ballots and replace them with fraudulent ones, all without detection. "The vulnerability is astonishing," said Matthew Green, who teaches cryptography at Johns Hopkins University and did not do the research but read the researchers' report. "In normal elections, there is no single person who could undetectably defraud the entire election. But in this system they built, there is a party who could do that."
The researchers provided their findings last week to Swiss Post, the country's national postal service, which developed the system with the Barcelona-based company Scytl. Swiss Post said in a statement the researchers provided Motherboard and that the Swiss Post plans to publish online on Tuesday, that the researchers were correct in their findings and that it had asked Scytl to fix the issue. It also downplayed the vulnerability, however, saying that to exploit it, an attacker would need control over Swiss Postâ(TM)s secured IT infrastructure "as well as help from several insiders with specialist knowledge of Swiss Post or the cantons."
The researchers provided their findings last week to Swiss Post, the country's national postal service, which developed the system with the Barcelona-based company Scytl. Swiss Post said in a statement the researchers provided Motherboard and that the Swiss Post plans to publish online on Tuesday, that the researchers were correct in their findings and that it had asked Scytl to fix the issue. It also downplayed the vulnerability, however, saying that to exploit it, an attacker would need control over Swiss Postâ(TM)s secured IT infrastructure "as well as help from several insiders with specialist knowledge of Swiss Post or the cantons."
But can we get back to the sloppy chicken and actual fucking spaghetti conversation?
I have to say that this finding has made the whole system more secure. This is difficult to say for closed source systems.
Any system where records are opaquely held is ripe for abuse and fraud.
So the takeaway is that the Swiss make their voting systems the same way they make their cheese: full of holes.
Spaghetti code served up, BORK BORK BORK
Back doors are NOT SECRETS.
First point: score one for open-source-based economy. The problem can now get fixed without the usual denials from the usual vested interests.
Question: The article says the backdoor allows changes to be "undetected." If the voting system is online isn't there a way that you can go back and verify that your vote was counted correctly?
It also downplayed the vulnerability, however, saying that to exploit it, an attacker would need control over Swiss PostÃ(TM)s secured IT infrastructure "as well as help from several insiders with specialist knowledge of Swiss Post or the cantons."
Everyone can be bought. It is just a matter of the right price in the right currency. That currency could be anything, from money until the number of your children that will come home safely from school next week.
There must always be a paper trail.
Then there is less likelihood that a breach won't be detected and an actual manual vote count is possible.
So people get some sort of say in how things are.
Elections have consequences.
Don't vote
Don't bitch about how things are.
1. All citizens generate their own public key and submit it in person to the government. The government makes note that citizen X has registered, but does not link their name with their key. Instead assigns them a universal identifier number.
2. All votes are published online, encrypted and plain text. And searchable via Universal identify number.
3. Once a citizen votes, they can check to see if their vote was manipulated, and others can count the votes. If a citizen comes forward and says their vote was changed, then you know someone was corrupt.
The only added responsibility every voter has is to check to make sure their vote was not changed when the counting begins.
an attacker would need control over Swiss Post's secured IT infrastructure "as well as help from several insiders with specialist knowledge
I've got some chocolate to trade for a password or two. Or if not that, maybe some cheese?
Science Daily: Social engineering: Password in exchange for chocolate
If the universe is someone's simulation -- does that mean the stars are just stuck pixels?
... simply either it is not anonymous or you are not able to scrutiny the fairness of the result.
Until someone find a solution to this fact, you must avoid machine based bvote for important topics such as politics.
The state of the art is inadequate to ensure secure, valid, accurate vote acquisition and tabulation. And there is no reason to expect it will be any time soon.
Just stop. Those most interested in electronic voting are either profiting from the deployment, or profiting from manipulating the results.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
I've always suspected that electronic voting systems, in order to be truly resistant to incessant and widespread hacking attacks, will have to accept the concept of issuing encrypted, printed paper receipts of cast votes to individual voters that then can be voluntarily passed on to independent, third-party tabulation organizations that act as a reality check on official election results. Purely online voting systems can conveniently produce both electronic receipts and downloadable PDF documents. Sure, this move might be problematic for the fundamental concept of the secret vote, but what the hell. What's worse, having to cope with that particular can of worms, which arguably already is open, or having to cope with the strong possibility of invisibly stolen elections? You makes your trade-offs, and you takes your chances.
That's my two cents worth of thought on the matter. No refunds! :^)
A truly excellent pizza parlor is a delight unto the heavens. Treasure the sauce and the toppings!
Bill got caught lying 12-25 times repeatedly stating "Blood plasma is sterile" and then later that "The Chinese Govt does not directly censor Chinese citizens" and other absolute bullshit head-in-ass retard-level lies. You're not trustworthy.
You are not a source of information that anyone should or even could trust, knowing your dishonest history. Sorry. That's what accountability means when you get caught lying repeatedly, over and over, even after directly corrected.
You're a liar, Bill.
Saying that the only people who could steal an election are a small cabal of government insiders is not particularly reassuring.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
I didn't tell you to vote. Seems like you could just find a voting machine that will take your vote. Doesn't seem to be a problem for most people. Excuse me while I explain to the moderators to stop telling me my posts are not editable and that I don't want to edit my post so shut your pie hole.
As the US is thebiggest joke of the international community, I find it hard to believe that the Swiss haven't been laughing at us as we keep implementing more and more voting machines but keep getting proved to be hacked. Not just hackable. How they save themselves a bundle and just tell their people we're not having a real vote this year, and then just present whoever the voting machine manufacturer selected to win. we all expect governments to f*** over there people but do actually have to be so insultingly not sneaky about it and pretend nobody knows what they're doing?
Count the paper votes in front of the needed set of witnesses.
Send the same count from each area to a final vote count.
Why trust a computer not to flip votes due to the politics of some NGO, think tank, mil, politics, other nation wanting Swiss votes to sway policy globally?
Return to paper and count every vote.
Make Swiss voting secure again.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Don't vote
Don't bitch about how things are.
I prefer to turn it around. If I vote and the same group of amoral corporate whores gets in, they can reply "Well, YOU voted for this!"
Voting = plausible deniability for corrupt politicians.
Go on, citizen, stamp the vote card. R or D, your choice.
You are right about " the same group of amoral corporate whores".
My post:
Coincidence only (Score:-1)
Tell me again why we still bother to vote.
Thanks to the dumbass who -1ed me.
Until we get big money out of politics, our little votes are meaningless!
The problem that is the critical flaw is that it's on the internet!!
There's only one vulnerability in electronic voting: it's the electronic voting machines. The patch is to use paper ballets. No person with any computer security experience should think these machines should be trusted.
full o holes =)
All computer systems are a black box, even if they are open source, how do you tell that is what the system is running ... and if you can, how do we know it is still running that after you looked ... and the system that is supposed to flag changes... who wrote that ... and can we verify it ... etc ... etc ... etc ...
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
A backdoor is something deliberately created to allow a malicious actor to gain access. It's espionage shit.
There is no evidence that this is anything other than your run-of-the-mill vulnerability. It's just bad engineer shit.
The fact that these kinds of vulnerabilities are run-of-the-mill is reason enough to never trust e-voting. I don't get the need to invent sensational fake news to sell the story.
Tired of the media telling me what to think.
Tired of Silicon Valley censoring me.
Tired of the government taxing and spending. Why don't they just take everything and just give me what they think I need.
Now they're watering down my vote.
In summary: the implementation does not provide a proof, and the verifier cannot check, that the important assumption of discrete log hardness made by Bayer and Groth is valid here. It is possible for a malicious authority to generate the perfectly random G1,G2,...in a way that, at the same time, gives it a trapdoor that falsifies an assumption that is central to the security of the Bayer-Groth mixnet construction.
In other words, the reported problem could only be exploited by directly affecting the given application/code. More specifically, certain (assumed-to-be) random numbers would have to be replaced (+ wrong results introduced). The critic is that, if that happened, the given encryption algorithm wouldn't know about that alteration, unlikely what should theoretically occur.
So, the researchers found a way to theoretically affect a cryptographic algorithm in a way which, under ideal circumstances, shouldn't happen. This is what they meant with backdoor: possibility to modify the flow of information against the original intention of the program. Is that bad, should it be fixed, etc.? Sure. In fact, the main point here is precisely to not allow any unmonitored modification of precisely those results. On the other hand, the reference to a "critical backdoor" seems to imply a completely different thing. To not mention the fact that all this is a bit too theoretical and uncontrollable (even by assuming that I have access to the application, how could I get X more votes for party Y?).
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
Switzerland votes to not be neutral, supports Russia!