1. No, virtually no one can read it. They don't have a barcode scanner in the voting booth with them.
2. Actually, I cannot. Without a reference to compare against, I cannot tell if a line is thick or thin. Besides, that's not a legitimate symbology (from your point #1.)
3. What good does it do to print the human readable code below what are essentially random stripes to a human? I can easily print bars that contain the word "VALID" but print the word "VOID" beneath them and you would never know. Even the vote counters wouldn't know unless they performed an audit.
I once did this for a friend's name tag. I had printed out our team's name tags in a barcode font as a kind of joke during an inventory system pilot, and a manager friend thought it was a great way for us to stand out, so he asked me to print one for him. So I did. The human readable portion read "KEVIN" but the barcode read "IDIOT". He thought he was uber-cool until he scanned it.
I know way too much about hacking systems to trust them with something this important. Simple human-understandable tokens are the only secure way that simple humans will be able to verify the security of an election. That's why the cryptographic systems are all doomed to fail -- they may be mathematically clever and secure to you and me and Bruce Schneier, but ordinary voters aren't cryptographers, and there is no simple way to explain a complex protocol. (For an exercise in futility, try explaining the concept of a zero-knowledge proof to my father-in-law. Despite the lack of that crucial bit of understanding, he is still eligible to vote, and he does.) Even if there was a way to explain the math simply, no human in a voting booth could perform the math required to prove the accuracy of their vote.
An 'X' in a box next to a name is clear intent. A circle around a name is clear intent. Random stripes or long strings of digits that might mean "yes" or "no" or "McCain" or "Obama" or "IDIOT" is not clear intent.
So, how can I get one of these forms and a Verizon installer costume? I mean if that's all it takes to get them to drag FiOS around my neighborhood, I'm there!
Are you really sure you gave it up "just so [you] could have broadband" or was it "because that bitch of an ex-wife wanted the beautiful house on the bay"?
Barcodes are not going to work for a voting application.
The problem with barcodes is that most ordinary humans cannot read them, so the ordinary humans don't know for sure what information is contained in them. Sure, you say you pushed the button for void, but how do you know it's the word "*VOID*" that's printed and not "*CONFIRMED*"? As a human, you don't.
To be trustable and easily understood by the average voter, the receipts must be human readable. If there is a real need for them to be machine readable, then they should be printed in an OCR font.
Go back and read more of this thread. The new two-factor authentication uses a separate customer-owned, bank-supplied, handheld device to generate a one-time use PIN. The encryption happens in hardware not owned by the merchant. Doesn't matter if the merchant's pad is good or corrupt -- the PIN is only good for one transaction, and if they're letting you out the door with the merchandise, you've got your end of the bargain.
I've been pondering ways to close the loophole of MITM attacks, but as you point out the random 4-digit nonce is opaque.
I've been thinking that the handheld could have two "modes", "Internet transfer" or "Physical Store". In "Physical Store" mode, you pass your authorization directly to the merchant, but you leave with the merchandise. It would be hard for the merchant to steal from you when you've already got the merchandise.
In "Internet transfer" mode, though, you want to assure the bank that this money should only go to Amazon. What if the handheld had a small digital camera, and the user had to take a picture of the corporate logo to which he wanted to send money? Even if you were on a phake amaz0n.com phishing site, as long as the logo looked like Amazon's, only Amazon could redeem the authorization for the money. The bank would refuse to authorize payments to unknown logos.
Just to scare the bejeebers out of you, whether or not the decryption appliance is owned by the merchant or the backend processor is merchant-dependent. In my world, the appliance is owned by the processor, but for some extremely stupid reasons that is not an absolute requirement.
Again, the security module is a handheld device resembling a small pocket calculator, and is NOT attached to the PC. The user enters their secret PIN only into the trusted handheld, never into the PC itself, and never into the merchant's PIN pad.
When you go to make a transaction, you enter your secret PIN into the handheld, and it displays a PIN for you to use for this one transaction. The PIN is valid for only one transaction. Key loggers can record the PIN as it is being legitimately used, but it is now spent and is no longer valid for a second transaction.
The handheld isn't ever connected to the internet, and doesn't get software upgrades. Unless they break into your house and physically mess with your personal module, the bad guys cannot tamper with it, and they cannot install key loggers on it. Even if they did, since the device is never connected to another system, there would be no way to have the device dump its logs without a second break-in to retrieve it.
You're thinking only about the encryption key injected into the PIN pad. I'm talking about the decryption appliance used at the backend. DUKPT is a protocol based on symmetric encryption. That means the decrypting end uses the same master key that was injected into the PIN pads.
If the merchant owns the decrypting appliance, then it's possible that the merchant owns the key.
I tend to ignore an actor's political statements, however (whether or not I agree with their sentiments). If I refused to watch any movie that included an actor that I'd seen make a fool out of him/herself, there'd be no point in my owning a DVD player - the pickings would be slim indeed.
That's a very wise attitude. And it's that kind of attitude that makes it OK in my brain to watch Susan Sarandon get fondled in Rocky Horror Picture Show.:-)
That's not the new two-factor system that they're testing or that I was referring to. I'm talking about the ones that use things like VASCO personal card readers. The bank sends you both the smart card and the reader. You keep the reader in your pocket, and use only it to generate PINs for your transactions.
The encryption hardware never leaves your possession. It does not electrically interface with the merchant system. It's used to generate a one-time-use PIN that you key into the merchant's terminal. The merchant doesn't get your original secret PIN, just the one you generated for your transaction.
But DUKPT is still based on the merchant's PIN pad doing the encryption. Consider that the merchant might be the secret key holder, decrypting and reencrypting the PIN before sending it on to the bank. It does not get the merchant out of the position of being trustworthy. Even with DUKPT, I, Joe Shopper, still have to key my most secret PIN into this PIN pad and trust the merchant doesn't have a sniffer and is encrypting everything properly.
With two-factor Chip-and-PIN encryption and a handheld card reader, I don't have to worry because the merchant never has the valuable part -- my personal PIN. They just get a single-use PIN.
It's not software at all. It's external hardware that the banks distribute. You enter your PIN into the trusted device, it sends that into your smart card for encryption, and it outputs a one-time-PIN for you to use for one transaction.
It doesn't matter where you use that PIN -- it's just a set of digits. You can enter it into the PIN pad at the grocery store, into a web site to transfer money, or into a PIN pad at Tony Soprano's bar, and nobody can do anything with it.
Now, if you use it to send money to an eBayer and he keeps the money but doesn't send you your stuff, well, that has nothing to do with trusting the banks and everything to do with trusting some random schmuck on the internet.
Fortunately for us here in America, someone long ago was smart enough to include the words "THIS NOTE IS LEGAL TENDER FOR ALL DEBTS, PUBLIC AND PRIVATE" on our currency, and I understand it's actually against the law (sorry, no citation) to refuse to accept cash for the full amount.
Of course, that's been tempered with the anti-money-laundering laws requiring identification for cash transactions exceeding $10 000. But still, if you owe $10, then the debtor must accept a $10 bill as payment in full.
What they do is move all the encryption to a "trusted platform" -- the device itself. You enter your card and your PIN into the handheld, and it's their own crypto hardware using their own crypto algorithm to generate a one-time-use PIN for you to enter into the merchant's PIN pad or into a web site.
This turns your card into a pure identification token, and turns your PIN into a secure authentication token. Without both tokens, the bank refuses to part with your money. You can enter this into a sleazy internet cafe's browser. It doesn't matter if that transaction's data is stolen or not, because the bank won't authorize your one-time PIN for a second transaction.
What makes these a great solution is not just their security, but that they're backward compatible with current PIN pad technology. The retailers just send your PIN along, they don't care if it's your personal PIN or a generated PIN. The bank takes care of that.
There's an even more secure variant that ABN-AMRO has deployed for web banking transactions. You enter the amount of the transaction into the handheld along with your PIN. That way, only the amount you authorize will be transferred, and the PIN is useless for any other amount.
(I'm basing my guess of $70 on the price of similar hardware offered by RSA with their SecurID scheme, but it's just a guess.)
Let's see, just exactly WHO should be responsible for the banks' security? Some random customer who is using them, or a staff of professionals whose entire industry is founded on the protection of money belonging to random customers? Seriously, if the banks were to pull that stunt on me, I'd switch to cash as there's absolutely no reason to use the banks if they're not going to offer me basic safeguards.
But I think there's an ulterior motive here. As a part of Chip-and-PIN, the UK is testing a brilliant two-factor authentication system this year for cards that will cryptographically render browser, PC, and merchant security moot. It's possible this is being used as a "warning shot" to frighten consumers into picking up the tab for the high cost (approximately $70) of the handheld security module.
They have the technology to keep it safe now. I think they're just too cheap to fund it themselves. (And I really wish we'd start seeing that kind of security technology available here in America. I'd switch banks and pay the $70 myself in a heartbeat.)
Anyone else think "Cyber Command" staff suffer a higher incidence of wedgies and swirlies than other members of our armed forces?
Actually, I'd think it'd be more like "give us your lunch money or we'll fsck up your mortgage, Visa cards, driver's license, and put your wife up on Craig's List."
I'm surprised no one's mentioned the claymore mine, where in big letters on the front it says "front towards enemy". Well, there is no lesson there that experience can successfully teach.
Yes, I understand that the free market is really what we have today. I'm kind of pointing that out. What I didn't state is that "change purely for change's sake because we don't like the RIAA" isn't going to be easy, especially given the way the RIAA has been able to throw money and lawyers at problems like this in the past.
The problem is not "will I be able to find a good gatekeeper whose musical tastes I agree with", but one specific to FM radio and publicly broadcast music. There are simply a limited and finite number of frequencies available, and these reach many more people daily than the average Shoutcast stream. Highly specialized tastes in music target a tiny audience, but radio is broadcast to hundreds of thousands of diverse listeners, and has to appeal to a broader audience.
The radio audience is definitely different -- in many ways, they're more "captive." They're on their way to work in their cars, or agreeing on a shared radio station at the dentist's office, or playing a radio at an impromptu picnic. Frequently they're mobile, which for most citizens still means "no internet", or at least not enough with the bandwidth to play music.
In a car, that doesn't matter as much. iPods and podcasts can give that measure of control to people who think that choice of music is important. But most people don't care about their music enough to mess around with podcasts -- the "pop" or "country" station is good enough to meet their need for an auditory background during their commute. And for many people, the DJ with the morning news becomes a personal friend. Again, podcasts lack that touch unless you're extremely diligent with syncing your iPod every morning moments before heading out the door. (That's still way too much effort for the average listener.)
iPods also fail miserably in the case of crowds joined for reasons other than music appreciation. I promise you that there isn't enough music on my nephew's iPod that I could sit through for 30 seconds. (Actually, that's true for all the music choices of my nephews and nieces, and most of my siblings-in-law.) I'd likely sabotage the damn thing before the end of the first George Strait song. Similarly, my collection of electronica and trance would be nothing but noise to him. A "classic rock" station may be bland enough as to not offend either of us, but neither of us may have any classic rock on our iPods. So where do you find a classic rock station at the beach, or on a picnic, or in a car? The answer today is still broadcast radio.
Perhaps in this new world the role of gatekeeper doesn't have to be a hand-picked RIAA payola jockey, but there are only a handful of frequencies to fill, and the public still wants "generic bland" music readily available. How are those few gatekeepers/DJs selected? Who identifies the DJs for the mass markets?
Since I don't even know if my TV can decode H.264, I'm not sure that's such a good idea.
Besides, there's an easier way to squeeze more bandwidth out of their wires: end the stupid Video On Demand service. Why the hell should they dedicate any percentage of their very limited bandwidth to a one-subscriber-at-a-time hog like that? I'd rather have UHD and Sci-Fi HD come in clearer than have access to their library.
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I can never un-see that now!
2. Actually, I cannot. Without a reference to compare against, I cannot tell if a line is thick or thin. Besides, that's not a legitimate symbology (from your point #1.)
3. What good does it do to print the human readable code below what are essentially random stripes to a human? I can easily print bars that contain the word "VALID" but print the word "VOID" beneath them and you would never know. Even the vote counters wouldn't know unless they performed an audit.
I once did this for a friend's name tag. I had printed out our team's name tags in a barcode font as a kind of joke during an inventory system pilot, and a manager friend thought it was a great way for us to stand out, so he asked me to print one for him. So I did. The human readable portion read "KEVIN" but the barcode read "IDIOT". He thought he was uber-cool until he scanned it.
I know way too much about hacking systems to trust them with something this important. Simple human-understandable tokens are the only secure way that simple humans will be able to verify the security of an election. That's why the cryptographic systems are all doomed to fail -- they may be mathematically clever and secure to you and me and Bruce Schneier, but ordinary voters aren't cryptographers, and there is no simple way to explain a complex protocol. (For an exercise in futility, try explaining the concept of a zero-knowledge proof to my father-in-law. Despite the lack of that crucial bit of understanding, he is still eligible to vote, and he does.) Even if there was a way to explain the math simply, no human in a voting booth could perform the math required to prove the accuracy of their vote.
An 'X' in a box next to a name is clear intent. A circle around a name is clear intent. Random stripes or long strings of digits that might mean "yes" or "no" or "McCain" or "Obama" or "IDIOT" is not clear intent.
So, how can I get one of these forms and a Verizon installer costume? I mean if that's all it takes to get them to drag FiOS around my neighborhood, I'm there!
I'm just sayin', y'know.
The problem with barcodes is that most ordinary humans cannot read them, so the ordinary humans don't know for sure what information is contained in them. Sure, you say you pushed the button for void, but how do you know it's the word "*VOID*" that's printed and not "*CONFIRMED*"? As a human, you don't.
To be trustable and easily understood by the average voter, the receipts must be human readable. If there is a real need for them to be machine readable, then they should be printed in an OCR font.
Go back and read more of this thread. The new two-factor authentication uses a separate customer-owned, bank-supplied, handheld device to generate a one-time use PIN. The encryption happens in hardware not owned by the merchant. Doesn't matter if the merchant's pad is good or corrupt -- the PIN is only good for one transaction, and if they're letting you out the door with the merchandise, you've got your end of the bargain.
I've been thinking that the handheld could have two "modes", "Internet transfer" or "Physical Store". In "Physical Store" mode, you pass your authorization directly to the merchant, but you leave with the merchandise. It would be hard for the merchant to steal from you when you've already got the merchandise.
In "Internet transfer" mode, though, you want to assure the bank that this money should only go to Amazon. What if the handheld had a small digital camera, and the user had to take a picture of the corporate logo to which he wanted to send money? Even if you were on a phake amaz0n.com phishing site, as long as the logo looked like Amazon's, only Amazon could redeem the authorization for the money. The bank would refuse to authorize payments to unknown logos.
Just to scare the bejeebers out of you, whether or not the decryption appliance is owned by the merchant or the backend processor is merchant-dependent. In my world, the appliance is owned by the processor, but for some extremely stupid reasons that is not an absolute requirement.
When you go to make a transaction, you enter your secret PIN into the handheld, and it displays a PIN for you to use for this one transaction. The PIN is valid for only one transaction. Key loggers can record the PIN as it is being legitimately used, but it is now spent and is no longer valid for a second transaction.
The handheld isn't ever connected to the internet, and doesn't get software upgrades. Unless they break into your house and physically mess with your personal module, the bad guys cannot tamper with it, and they cannot install key loggers on it. Even if they did, since the device is never connected to another system, there would be no way to have the device dump its logs without a second break-in to retrieve it.
If the merchant owns the decrypting appliance, then it's possible that the merchant owns the key.
That's a very wise attitude. And it's that kind of attitude that makes it OK in my brain to watch Susan Sarandon get fondled in Rocky Horror Picture Show. :-)
The encryption hardware never leaves your possession. It does not electrically interface with the merchant system. It's used to generate a one-time-use PIN that you key into the merchant's terminal. The merchant doesn't get your original secret PIN, just the one you generated for your transaction.
With two-factor Chip-and-PIN encryption and a handheld card reader, I don't have to worry because the merchant never has the valuable part -- my personal PIN. They just get a single-use PIN.
It doesn't matter where you use that PIN -- it's just a set of digits. You can enter it into the PIN pad at the grocery store, into a web site to transfer money, or into a PIN pad at Tony Soprano's bar, and nobody can do anything with it.
Now, if you use it to send money to an eBayer and he keeps the money but doesn't send you your stuff, well, that has nothing to do with trusting the banks and everything to do with trusting some random schmuck on the internet.
Of course, that's been tempered with the anti-money-laundering laws requiring identification for cash transactions exceeding $10 000. But still, if you owe $10, then the debtor must accept a $10 bill as payment in full.
What they do is move all the encryption to a "trusted platform" -- the device itself. You enter your card and your PIN into the handheld, and it's their own crypto hardware using their own crypto algorithm to generate a one-time-use PIN for you to enter into the merchant's PIN pad or into a web site.
This turns your card into a pure identification token, and turns your PIN into a secure authentication token. Without both tokens, the bank refuses to part with your money. You can enter this into a sleazy internet cafe's browser. It doesn't matter if that transaction's data is stolen or not, because the bank won't authorize your one-time PIN for a second transaction.
What makes these a great solution is not just their security, but that they're backward compatible with current PIN pad technology. The retailers just send your PIN along, they don't care if it's your personal PIN or a generated PIN. The bank takes care of that.
There's an even more secure variant that ABN-AMRO has deployed for web banking transactions. You enter the amount of the transaction into the handheld along with your PIN. That way, only the amount you authorize will be transferred, and the PIN is useless for any other amount.
(I'm basing my guess of $70 on the price of similar hardware offered by RSA with their SecurID scheme, but it's just a guess.)
But I think there's an ulterior motive here. As a part of Chip-and-PIN, the UK is testing a brilliant two-factor authentication system this year for cards that will cryptographically render browser, PC, and merchant security moot. It's possible this is being used as a "warning shot" to frighten consumers into picking up the tab for the high cost (approximately $70) of the handheld security module.
They have the technology to keep it safe now. I think they're just too cheap to fund it themselves. (And I really wish we'd start seeing that kind of security technology available here in America. I'd switch banks and pay the $70 myself in a heartbeat.)
Remember, 50% of all Americans are below average. That means even a total idiot has a 50% chance of being in his peer group.
Actually, I'd think it'd be more like "give us your lunch money or we'll fsck up your mortgage, Visa cards, driver's license, and put your wife up on Craig's List."
Here it is on Street View.
I don't know if it's still active or not, but every other one I've seen has been removed. And I didn't feel a burning need to test it.
But, can you teach them to fish? Give a man a phish and you'll eat for a day.
Teach a man to phish and you won't get jack squat out of it, ever.
Yes, I understand that the free market is really what we have today. I'm kind of pointing that out. What I didn't state is that "change purely for change's sake because we don't like the RIAA" isn't going to be easy, especially given the way the RIAA has been able to throw money and lawyers at problems like this in the past.
The radio audience is definitely different -- in many ways, they're more "captive." They're on their way to work in their cars, or agreeing on a shared radio station at the dentist's office, or playing a radio at an impromptu picnic. Frequently they're mobile, which for most citizens still means "no internet", or at least not enough with the bandwidth to play music.
In a car, that doesn't matter as much. iPods and podcasts can give that measure of control to people who think that choice of music is important. But most people don't care about their music enough to mess around with podcasts -- the "pop" or "country" station is good enough to meet their need for an auditory background during their commute. And for many people, the DJ with the morning news becomes a personal friend. Again, podcasts lack that touch unless you're extremely diligent with syncing your iPod every morning moments before heading out the door. (That's still way too much effort for the average listener.)
iPods also fail miserably in the case of crowds joined for reasons other than music appreciation. I promise you that there isn't enough music on my nephew's iPod that I could sit through for 30 seconds. (Actually, that's true for all the music choices of my nephews and nieces, and most of my siblings-in-law.) I'd likely sabotage the damn thing before the end of the first George Strait song. Similarly, my collection of electronica and trance would be nothing but noise to him. A "classic rock" station may be bland enough as to not offend either of us, but neither of us may have any classic rock on our iPods. So where do you find a classic rock station at the beach, or on a picnic, or in a car? The answer today is still broadcast radio.
Perhaps in this new world the role of gatekeeper doesn't have to be a hand-picked RIAA payola jockey, but there are only a handful of frequencies to fill, and the public still wants "generic bland" music readily available. How are those few gatekeepers/DJs selected? Who identifies the DJs for the mass markets?
Besides, there's an easier way to squeeze more bandwidth out of their wires: end the stupid Video On Demand service. Why the hell should they dedicate any percentage of their very limited bandwidth to a one-subscriber-at-a-time hog like that? I'd rather have UHD and Sci-Fi HD come in clearer than have access to their library.