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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."
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
Paper voting has neither problem...
Look, I'm not against progress, I'm just against changing something that works when you don't have a replacement that can actually replace all it's existing features.
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.
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 mean the spaghetti harvest in Ticino?
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
Their comment shows how incomplete these people think. "Oh, you'd have to have access to our secure IT network and no hacker has that!".
Granted, I'll give you that much. But you have. Your government has. And especially that last party can have a very large interest in keeping the power where they think it belongs.
People seem to not realise that even though you can defraud paper ballots, the process is very hard and to be able to make significant impact you need a lot of people in on it. Defrauding an electronic ballot can be done by one person and can cover the complete ballot and can be undetectable. This single vulnerability is the reason why electronic ballots are a Bad Idea(tm).
"Sure, you can trust this public key generator. Course you can"
"Of course no-one has linked your public key to your universal identifier number. You can totally trust us on that"
"Absolutely, what you see on the screen in front of you when you search for a universal identity number really reflects the reality of how your vote was (or was not) counted"
etc
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!