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DARPA Is Building a $10 Million, Open Source, Secure Voting System (vice.com)
samleecole writes: For years security professionals and election integrity activists have been pushing voting machine vendors to build more secure and verifiable election systems, so voters and candidates can be assured election outcomes haven't been manipulated. Now they might finally get this thanks to a new $10 million contract the Defense Department's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has launched to design and build a secure voting system that it hopes will be impervious to hacking.
The first-of-its-kind system will be designed by an Oregon-based firm called Galois, a longtime government contractor with experience in designing secure and verifiable systems. The system will use fully open source voting software, instead of the closed, proprietary software currently used in the vast majority of voting machines, which no one outside of voting machine testing labs can examine. More importantly, it will be built on secure open source hardware, made from special secure designs and techniques developed over the last year as part of a special program at DARPA. The voting system will also be designed to create fully verifiable and transparent results so that voters don't have to blindly trust that the machines and election officials delivered correct results.
The first-of-its-kind system will be designed by an Oregon-based firm called Galois, a longtime government contractor with experience in designing secure and verifiable systems. The system will use fully open source voting software, instead of the closed, proprietary software currently used in the vast majority of voting machines, which no one outside of voting machine testing labs can examine. More importantly, it will be built on secure open source hardware, made from special secure designs and techniques developed over the last year as part of a special program at DARPA. The voting system will also be designed to create fully verifiable and transparent results so that voters don't have to blindly trust that the machines and election officials delivered correct results.
That is very important and didn't see that listed in there in the top level checkoff marks.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Vote by mail is growing rapidly and in many places exceeds polling place voting. VBM increases voter turnout and solves so many problems that polling place voting probably isn't worth salvaging.
This special 'secure' open hardware: Will you actually ensure there is a reference platform available, for less than say 500 usd to the average consumer, so that we can develop on, test, diagnose, and verify this hardware ourselves, or use it to ensure the security and authenticity of our own application code?
If not, then it is just a 10 million dollar sham. The software, even if perfectly secure by itself, is not trustworthy unless the underlying hardware is trustworthy, and the underlying hardware isn't trustworthy unless everyone can buy an example of it, ideally right off the production line, and swap/not swap their example for one of the government units, helping to ensure that the entire government run hasn't been compromised itself since they knew the start/end manufacturing serials for their own batch of units.
Obviously they would still need to verify some number of those units to make sure they weren't backdoored (although doing it at the assembly location/warehouse on one big event day would handle it nicely. Once that step is done and the traded serials can be verified in the field, we will have almost trustworthy electronic voting. Particularly if each machine cryptographically signs its voting lists when finished, and ideally provides the voter a hash to verify their vote matches what they input while retaining their anonymity until and unless they need to contest a miscast vote.
I've posted this before, but it's worth saying again.
In the early 2000s, there was a GNU project to build a secure online voting system. They ceased work in 2002, citing the project as being at best difficult and at worst, impossible. They quoted Bruce Schneier, one of the foremost experts in computer security as saying "a secure Internet voting system is theoretically possible, but it would be the first secure networked application ever created in the history of computers... [B]uilding a secure Internet-based voting system is a very hard problem, harder than all the other computer security problems we've attempted and failed at. I believe that the risks to democacy are too great to attempt it."
I see no evidence that Schneier has changed his mind or that any other comparably qualified expert has suggested he's wrong.
bingo.
When New Mexico implemented random sampled recounts they used 10 sided dice done in publicfor random precinct selection. When colorado did it, they hired eminent computer scientists to design the recount and they use a computer random number generator and all the selections is automated in the computer. No one who understands computers trusts the colorado system though admittedly it's way better than nothing. it just violates the transparency for the sake of some computer science optimality in the algorithm.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.