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Can voting machines be safe with good election procedures?

When security researchers show how to hack a voting machine, is it just a stunt that couldn't happen in the context of a real election?

Princeton researcher Dan Wallach talks about the difference between what his team did and what a real attacker would have to do. The bottom line is that a real attack would be a bit more work, but not prohibitively so.

His full article is at http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=1304. Excerpts below.

"Our work found a wide variety of flaws, most notably the possibility of "viral" attacks, where a single corrupted voting machine could spread that corruption, as part of regular processes and procedures, to every other voting system. "

"At this point, the scientific evidence is in, it's overwhelming, and it's indisputable.  The current generation of DRE voting systems have a wide variety of dangerous security flaws. "
...
"The big difference between what we had and what an attacker might have is that we had some (but not nearly all) source code to the system.  An attacker who arranged for some equipment to "fall off the back of a truck" would be able to extract all of the software, in binary form, and then would need to go through a tedious process of reverse engineering before reaching parity with the access we had."
...
"When the vendors call our work "unrealistic", they usually mean one of two things:

   1. Real attackers couldn't discover these vulnerabilities
   2. The attackers can't be exploited in the real world.

Both of these arguments are wrong. In real elections, individual voting machines are not terribly well safeguarded.  In a studio where I take swing dance lessons, I found a rack of eSlates two weeks after the election in which they were used.  They were in their normal cases.  There were no security seals.  (I didn't touch them, but I did have a very good look around.) That's more than sufficient access for an attacker wanting to tamper with a voting machine. "
...
"I'll estimate that it would take a group of four talented people, working full time, two to three months of effort to do it[develop an attack].  Once.  After that, you've got your evil attack software, ready to go, with only minutes of effort to boot a single eSlate, install the malicious software patch, and then it's off to the races.  The attack would only need to be installed on a single eSlate per county in order to spread to every other eSlate.  The election professionals and procedures would be helpless to prevent it.  "
...
"What about auditing, reconciliation, "logic and accuracy" testing, and other related procedures? Again, all easily defeated by a sophisticated attacker."

The only kind of testing he considers effective is to cross-check a sample of voter-verified printouts against the machine-recorded votes.

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--accuracy" testing just plain old function testing.  It is NOT security testing.

I agree with his basic premise about voter-verified--I just wish he'd use the term "ballot."  A ballot has legal status as the real vote; "trails," "printouts" etc. do not.

Even aside from deliberate attacks, there is just plain old software bugginess to consider--no complex software is ever free of it.  With word processing programs and spreadsheets, though, millions of users report all of the ones that compromise functionality, so that while never bug-free, these programs eventually become robust and stable.

Voting machine software is used a couple of times a year by people who have no connection with the programmers who wrote it.  If a machine (say in Snohomish County) makes them vote for Rossi instead of Gregoire, the only people available to complain to may not be able to do anything about it.

Think about how badly cars would suck if nobody ever drove them except for a couple of times a year.

Before we even think of trying to get a national consortium to develop open source software, we need to make auditing mandatory.  In an analytical chemistry lab, all equipment from simple scales to quadrupole mass spectrometers is constantly audited.  For auditing purposes, a set of standard weights is far mor useful than only having a schematic of the scale.

by eridani on Sat Sep 06, 2008 at 09:27:49 PM PST

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Malicious code can be inserted in a variety of locations, by a wide variety of people.

Progammers who create the tabulation source code, database code.  Technicians who write the updates before and during elections. A variety of insiders who have access to the machines and memory cards, and to the GEMS central tabulator.

It has been alleged by a computer expert who used to support McCain, Stephen Spoonamore, believes that the 2002 Georgia election was stolen by the head of Diebold who personally delivered memory card updates to several county jurisdictions.

These systems are a joke. Computers are good for many applications, but elections is not one of them.

If you  want a democracy, then it should be paper ballots, hand counts, citizen oversight.  Private corporations with control over counting and recording votes have no place in this process. Even publicly owned systems will end up in the control of election insiders.  They still lack transparency. So long as we use machines, the process lacks transparency and verifiabilty by We The People.

Spoonamore video.

by raincity calling on Tue Sep 09, 2008 at 05:50:58 PM PST

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...how did King County manage to get the "X of Y ballots remaining" counts wrong on the ballot stubs? They've been printing the same ballots for a decade. Where were the observers? Where was the news coverage?

by m3047 on Tue Sep 09, 2008 at 11:29:30 PM PST

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Whether you are talking about machines or people, the less often an operation is performed, the greater the likelihood of screwing something up.

by eridani on Sat Sep 13, 2008 at 11:41:14 PM PST

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