Washblog

I've sent the following to the legislators from  my LD.

Dear Legislators,

This is an extremely bad idea, for many reasons. But the main point for the moment is: it violates the provision of the State Constitution which guarantees that a citizen's ballot shall be secret.

There is NO WAY that a computer/communications system, cryptographic or not, can be secure.

This conclusion rests on both theoretical and practical grounds. Here are specific references.

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"Fannie Mae contract worker pleaded not guilty Friday to a federal charge he planted a virus designed to destroy all the data on the mortgage giant's 4,000 computer servers nationwide."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/01/30/feds-allege-plot-to-destr_n_162733.html

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"...banks and financial institutions continue to lose millions of dollars every year to trusted insiders who...accounted for approximately 70%, or $2.4 billion, of the $3.4 billion that banks lost as a result of both internal and external fraud and hacker incidents in 2004."

http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_bruce_o__061025_pull_the_plug_on_e_v.htm

And it isn't just insiders...
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"The Defense Department is deep-sixing an nternet voting program over concerns about security, a Pentagon spokeswoman said ....The cancellation follows a report by ... computer security experts asked to test the system...concluded the system did not ensure the legitimacy of votes. The report they issued said there were a number of ways that computer hackers could crack into the system." [The `experts' were leading scientists; I know one personally...]

http://www.defenselink.mil/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=27362

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And bear in mind that internet messages from overseas are routed through communications networks run by foreign governments and corporations.

A congressional panel warned in November that China had developed a sophisticated cyber warfare program and stepped up its capacity to penetrate US computer networks to extract sensitive information.

Other nations are fully as competent as China... and internet voting, besides being contrary to the state Constitution, puts US elections at risk...

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Software systems are vulnerable to malware. Malware can be implanted far in advance of elections.

Dr. Kenneth Thompson, one of our most highly-regarded scientists, won the Turing Prize [an honor maybe just a little below a Nobel] for a paper which has become one of the classics; in it he showed how a trojan horse can be designed and released to do its work undetectably...He said:

" The moral is obvious. You can't trust code that you did not totally create yourself. (Especially code from companies that employ people like me.) No amount of source-level verification or scrutiny will protect you from using untrusted code. In demonstrating the possibility of this kind of attack, I picked on the C compiler. I could have picked on any program-handling program such as an assembler, a loader, or even hardware microcode. As the level of program gets lower, these bugs will be harder and harder to detect. A well installed microcode bug will be almost impossible to detect

Dr. Peter Neumann, another of our most distinguished computer scientists: "Even if you can look at the source code, you can't guarantee that there's not a Trojan horse embedded somewhere in the code. Any self-respecting system programmer can hack the innards of the system to defeat encryption techniques or any password protection, or anything like that. All this stuff is trivial to break, for the most part. In most computer systems out there, it is child's play. Given the fact that the underlying systems are so penetrable, it is relatively easy to fudge data-for example, to start out with three thousand votes for one guy and zero for the other before the counting even starts, even though the counter shows zero. Essentially a Trojan horse in the coding. I can do it in the operating system. I can do it in the application program. Or I can do it in the compiler. I can rig it so that all test decks work perfectly well...."

Information theorists have brought the discussion to its very end. "In `An Undetectable Computer Virus' David Chess and Steven White of IBM show that you can always create a vote changing program (called virus there) that no `verification software' can ever detect. They do this by a very clever argument which you can pursue in that paper, but the important thing to realize is that their results are not in doubt. You also should know that these arguments apply to every computer system that can ever be created. Therefore, if you use a computer anywhere in the vote counting process, you cannot be certain of the result."

http://www.research.ibm.com/antivirus/SciPapers/VB2000DC.htm

Now, please, if I may I'd ask you [legislator] to re-read the last para above...

There is no way that internet voting can be secure.

In Euclidian geometry, parallel lines never meet. This is not arguable; it isn't opinion, it's logic.  This dominates all theorems.  No one, no matter how wealthy or persuasive, can contrive a proposition dependent on parallel lines meeting. Nor can anyone make internet voting secure. It's impossible, on theoretical and operational grounds. Just as, in everyday spacetime, parallel lines do not meet, do not cross, ever; internet voting can never be secure.

Since internet voting is fundamentally at odds with the State Constitution [besides being an engineering nightmare - but that's another topic] it seems to me that you must vote against it.

Sincere regards,

From the 34LD

HB1624; SC5522