Electronic Voting Machine Cracker Challenge

An anonymous reader writes "In the ongoing debate on the security of electronic voting, an Atlanta area programmer has confronted Georgia election officials on the potential for fraud in its statewide electronic voting system. She claims that she can be prepared to crack the system within a week, and officials have accepted the challenge." What makes this even more interesting is that the election officials are encouraging the woman, so that any possible exploit can be found and remedied.

This is VERY true

The Diebold system does have major flaws. I was just at the Crypto2003 conference where one of the talks was on the faults in this system. Amongst other things, when they pointed out the major errors in code, the company replied back calling DES (or DSA, I forget) a compression scheme, and they implemented an algorithm from Handbook of Applied Crypto for purposes of encryption with a value listed in the book that says explicitly "Do not use this for cryptographic purposes"

Re:This is VERY true

and they implemented an algorithm from Handbook of Applied Crypto for purposes of encryption with a value listed in the book that says explicitly "Do not use this for cryptographic purposes"

It was actually worse than this -- they used a Linear Congruential Generator, which is a very cheap method of generating "random" numbers. Those numbers might work well for simulations, but for cryptography they're totally predictable once you've seen just a couple of output values. Cryptography relies upon the unpredictability of random numbers for security, so LCGs should never be used for that purpose.

At Least

This is a change from the Kevin Mitnick days when ppl would be incarcerated for even *thinking* about cracking a gov system.

Mad props to Georgia for being cool about this.

The difference is....

The difference is that she didn't try to hack it first. She made a challenge and they accepted. This is how normal society acts. Hackers have made a bad name for themselves by doing things without other people's knowledge or permission---often to show off their "superior skills". Hackers may feel this is no big deal or some sort of "good work", but normal people feel very threatened and violated. Hence people like Mitnick go to jail.

If Mitnick had asked and recieved permission like this woman, there would have been no problems.

Brian Ellenberger

SCO Voting

SCO's Intellectual Property and Trade Secrets are embedded within the Georgia voting system, and my lawyers assure me that this programmer will be vehemently prosecuted under the full extent of Georgia Law if this "crack" attempt is successful.

The Plan

1. Accept the challenge.
2. Make her win.
3. Fix holes.
4. Put her to jail on DMCA basis, or Patriot Act, or for desire to live and love for the country, or whatever.
5. ???
6. PROFIT!!!

(Hope #4 won't happen.)

Reasoning?

Moreover, they said, paper ballots can be tampered with more easily than electronic ones, and they're harder to tabulate.

Sorry, don't believe that. A few locations in memory are easier to change than thousands of paper ballots. Hanging chads notwithstanding...

Nice comeback at the end -
Asked Williams, the computer security expert: "Are you saying there's no such thing as a secure and accurate computer? Do you fly on airplanes?"

I think I'd counter that by asking if he knew of any airplane where all members of the general public were allowed access to the terminals used by the pilots? And if so - does he fly with them?

Paper AND Computers

We changed our voting a few years back from the old mechanical lever system to one where you get a sheet of paper and a Sharpie to fill in the oval for the candidates/issues. Then you walk over to the scanner (with your ballot inside a cardboard sleeve to keep people from seeing it) and feed it through yourself. This arrangement has several advantages over the old one:

1. More people can fill out their ballots at once. Instead of being limited to the number of machines for your precinct (we have consolidated 4 precincts into a single location now) you are only limited by the number of lightweight, cheap carrels that shield your ballot from prying eyes. (If those are all full, and you want to fill it out in the open, that doesn't disqualify your vote.)
2. Absentee voters can recieve a ballot exactly like the one they would vote on normally (since no special equipment is required to do the voting) which can be held until election day and counted with the rest.
3. When the polls close at 7PM, the scanner can dial up and transmit all the totals instantly, and we have an accurate count within minutes.
4. If something goes wrong with the scanner, we can insert our paper ballots into a locked ballot box, which can then be opened for scanning (along with the ones that already went through the scanner into a lockbox) when the scanner is repaired or replaced, or the entire box taken downtown to be scanned there.
5. All the ballots can be taken down to the courthouse and run through several different scanners to confirm they all give the same totals.
6. Who is this 'Chad'? If a hand recount is ordered, we have solid pieces of paper and don't have the spectacle of judges holding them up to the light to try to devine the voters' intent. White paper. Red oval. Black marker. Not much room for argument there.
7. We can run random audits of just one or two polling places, and even limit it to just one question on the ballot - do a hand count and see if the numbers agree with the ones sent from that scanner. Since the software authors can't possibly know which one would be audited, they wouldn't be able to cheat even if they wanted to.

Why electronic voting ?

I most European countries people use pen & paper voting.
And unlike the US there was never a Florida voting scam.
And paper is much more immune to fraud: the election sheets are stored for a certain time, so any questions and be sorted out by a recount without any paper pebbles dropping from the holes. And if a fraudelent government wants to pull off a voting scam they have either to forge election sheets, which would be noted afterwards, or they have to destroy sheets, which would be noted, too.

So why use a high-tech solution which isn't immune to fraud and other problems instead of a low-tech solution which hasn't these problems ?

Re:Why electronic voting ?

While I agree that there are flaws with going to an electronic ballot, there are several advantages over paper ballots.

As an example I live in a voting district that Senetor Wellstone represented. As a result of his plane crash and death two weeks before the general election Voting involved suplementary ballots for the senate seat he had been running for. The paper ballots had already been printed as the normal date for candidates to declare had already passed. Suplementary ballots had to be printed when Mondale ran as the party candidate replacement for Wellstone.

An electronic voting system would have mearly required a change to the template each voting machine used for the election.

Other advantages include faster reporting of vote counts. Though this can normaly be handled by an electronic counter for paper ballots (using the filled oval method)

One method of making a paper count possible with an electronic ballot system would be to print a paper copy of the selections made by the voter, and have the voter initial that the copy is what they chose, which then gets filed. It could be as simple as a table of offices with the selected candidate. A large number of ballots with the same initials would be a flag for concern as it may show an election official is not following the accepted procedure. Initials would not be generally traceable back to the person who made that mark.

A series of numbers at the top or bottom of the page, or as an additional table entry would provide a machine readable version of the selection. I don't know of any election official who would relish the thought of going through 10,000 or 100,000 (or more) ballots and reading off each name.

Then again, that's just my view.

-Rusty

Re:Why electronic voting ?

Maybe a voting machine that produces a roll of paper with all the votes written on it close to each other (like the machines they use in stores, which I don't know the English name for, but you get a small paper receipt that shows how much you paid) is in order. The counting of the votes goes very quickly with the computer and in case of doubt there is this long slip of paper that is difficult to tamper with if the right ink is used.

Paper more immune to fraud?

Sorry to burst your bubble, but paper voting is rife with fraud, that is one of the major reasons it took so long to rid many of it.

Going to digital introduced a whole new system, whereby the exploiters of the previous lost their investment and are forced to start again.

Voter authentication needs to be taken further with the requirement of a picture ID, as it stands now, many dead vote on paper ballots, and many votes that are for one party or another are either lost or damaged so as to become invalid.

If Florida proved anything, it proved just how dangerous paper ballots were, and even how more dangerous subsequent handling of them was. Seems to me many stories of how the same box of ballots yieleded different results depending on who looked at them!!! How is that not an easier source of fraud? Especially when people start introducting "interpetation of intent" into the mix!

Sorry, digital voting will one day be the only true way to avoid fraudelent voting, however for that to come about we will had to shed some of our mickey mouse vanities. Something must be done to not only protect our vote from a fraud at the machine but to protect our vote from fraudelent voters (ie, the dead, the multi-voters, etc)

It's a win-win (then lose) situation!

She cracks it, reveals the expoit to them, they thank her, put fixing it on a "to do list", then knock her into prison with the mighty DMCA!

I can already hear the local news station:
"Computer hackers are trying to steal your votes! Politicans are asking that if you know ANYONE who both likes computers and is interested in voting that you report them to the police immediately. Film at eleven."

doh

God, this is stupid....

Instead of doing such a media hype just open the source code for the public and let about 10'000 people have a look at it.

Idiots.

Re:doh

I'm glad someone else brought this up so I didn't have to. If there was ever an application that needed to be open source, this is it. There's simply too much at stake and too much of a chance for shady manipulation if our voting system was to suddenly become a mystical blackbox where no one really knew what was going on inside.

The only way to disprove any kind of impropriety in an electronic voting system would be to make the internal workings freely viewable to anyone, anywhere. Not only would there be concerned "Citzen Hackers" checking the code, but I'm sure it'd open up a whole field of university level research. And honestly, I'd far rather my tax dollars go to research grants where an open system can be checked and improved than to a private company which may or may not have an agenda that I don't know about.

prove

Please will at least everyone keep in mind that when she wont succeed in cracking the machine that doesn't prove it's security.

You can't prove a product is secure, only showing that it's insecure...

Re:prove

It's going to be her and several other programmers. they have had the source code for months, and know what the problem is. the machines run windows and Access.

blackbox Voting [blackboxvoting.org]

The Odds

He put the odds of corrupting the software undetected at 1 billion to one.

If you make a statement like that you are asking for trouble. It's like walking into a bar and saying 'No one here could win in a fight with me.'

Why not open the challenge to all?

If I was to don the tinfoil hat for a bit, I'd say the only reason the dare was so readily accepted by election officials was to stage the illusion of security and uncrackability.

Of course, this is assuming Ms Jekot fails to find weaknesses in the voting system.

Even if she does find exploitable flaws, will she find all of them? Probably not, in my opinion.

Am I being cynical and paranoid? Hell yes.

Who do you trust?

Although it's good to have an independant security audit of the hardware/software, it's still a far cry from what I would call development of a secure system.

Did an independant auditor (or security specialist) audit the design - both hardware and software - from a security point of view? Where there independant audits/reviews of the coding or assembly of the hardware? Can you trust the developers or factory workers? Who is monitoring the deployment, development, good working, ...? What are the logging/auding possibilities? How secure is the data transmitted? How secure is that data stored?

Who will monitor the people who are in charge of the system?

Ultimately, you have to trust someone. And putting trust in the wrong kind of people is the biggest security risk there is ...

This is a hoax

This is obviously a hoax. Everyone knows that there are no women in computer science. :)

I've been in college for a few years and I haven't seen a women since I stopped taking Gen. Ed. classes.

Re:This is a hoax

Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, author of Cobol.

Remember, those who know no history are doomed to repeat it. You, my friend, are therefore doomed to reinvent Cobol.

I *STILL* can't believe

that the companies that manufacture voting machines are not mandated to publish full specifications including technical drawings and listings of firmware, for anyone to look at, any time, for free. It's like they are trying to say mere mortals are not supposed to know the processes by which their representatives are elected.

And don't give me the hand-wringing "important proprietary secrets" crap. Firstly, all companies would be required to show their "secrets", so nobody would be gaining any unfair advantage. Secondly, what the hell is so secret about adding up a bunch of numbers anyway? And thirdly, what corporate secret is more important than the due processes of democracy?

If these companies are not prepared to let the general public - who are, after all, the rightful owners of "Government" property - scrutinise their products, thenthat alone is a good enough reason why the public should reject their products.

the state is so worried that they

have destroyed the record of the 2002 election, in defiance of federal law. they have stated that the election went smoothly.

Right before the election, an uncertified patch was installed to all the voting machines in Georgia. There were some stunning upsets in the race. Saxby Chambliss and Sonny Perdue won in dramatic, come from behind fashion.

the Libertarian party candidate has issued a formal request for the voting records, the ones that have been destroyed.

If she fails

This only PROVES their ignorance. If one person fails in one week, that's far from showing that the system is secure.

Open Sourcing it won't make it secure either, but it would probably be the fastest way to fix a ton of the most obvious holes.

Better yet, if they want good PR, they should hire Mitnick to have a go at it. Lord knows he's probably rusty, but his name alone would end the debate one way or the other.

Run elections at Defcon

or some other cracker conference. Sort of like electing the King and Queen of the County Fair. Just announce that at Defcon you're going to elect the Evil Overlord of All The Crackers, and you're going to use Diebold machines to count the votes. That should lead to some amazing exploits :).

Who is this woman?

She's a webmaster with an interest in carnivorpus plants. She did this site.
http://www.cumbus2002.org/eco_rescue.htm
N ote the fucked up links on the bottom of the page. They point to c:.
She does not even have a web site for her web design business! AWEBPLACE.COM is registered to her company Southern Belle Software. Search for some of her posts to newsgroups for more dismaying info.

How about posting the code here, Roxanne? A 'few of your expert friends' will be happy to help you out.

Electronic Voting Machines

At least in a paper voting world, there needs to be some semblance of a paper trail record to be available for recounting.

While such systems can be manipulated, it takes quite a lot of people in the loop to do so. Voter early, vote often; run a steel rod through any Republican ballots in Democratic areas...

The move to scannable ballots using sharpie markers is a bit better but physical security of those are questionable as they allow thermal printouts and often have the covers open at the polling places.

Right now, if I want to steal an election, I probably have to bury my opponent in the places that I control the entire polling apparatus with my political party hacks. It looks crude and messy to anyone who watches.

Now if we have all the local precincts reporting frequently into a central computer system with two way back door communications; we can easily determine the number of manufactured ballots needed and allocate them over a greater number of precincts without drawing any attention at all.

An example of this is a weighted average cost bid, I have personal experience with this. If we know that there are two items on the list; one says it will buy a million of an item and the other says it will buy 3 of the item but the quantities are reversed. I can make my evaluated bid much lower and rape the buyer by biddin no cost for the first item and $10,000 for the second item (assuming both are worth $1000); however the bid will look really, really abnormal compared to the other bidders and they are going to smell a rat even if they don't know the real quantities to be bought.

However, were I to just shade the bid a bit by lowering the cost on one and raising on the other I could win the bid, have higher margins and no one be any the wiser. OK, the example of a million vs 3 is too extreme but so is the ballot count for Democrats in these key urban areas coming in higher than the total number of living and dead there.

If the election comes in as the controlling power wishes, there is no need to do anything. If it is off track, they can certainly round up people on buses to vote but they can also create some new ballots that will be totally untraceable.

All electronic balloting is not to be trusted.

Computers do many wonderful things, counting elections is not one of them.

D

More background

Curious for more about this story, the best background I found was here. [workersrighttovote.org]. Also, this bill [loc.gov] seems to be starting down a better path toward a publicly viewable system. Not sure about the paper trail part though.

No paper trial == trouble

The potential for fraud is only part of the problem with electronic voting. The biggest problem is the lack of a hard paper trial to use in the event of a recount or if the machine crashes. Suppose you have a group of booths in a busy voting district that suddenly decide to blue-screen. Potentially, thousands of votes could be lost. The lack of a paper trial has been brought up many times, but proponents of the system have so far dismissed it as unneccessary. This is just asking for trouble.

Even worse is cases like those in Florida where the state purchased new electronic voting machines with the provision that their warranty would be immediately canceled if the state ran tests to verify their performance. Egads! This has fraud and disaster written all over it.

Our system of democracy is very important our liberties. As voters, we should insist that our voting system be beyond question. That means it should be secure, verifiable, and robust. The best way to accomplish this is through open-source peer review of the code and hard-copy backup of voting results for auditing purposes.

Two things here...

" Asked Williams, the computer security expert: "Are you saying there's no such thing as a secure and accurate computer? Do you fly on airplanes?" "

That would be the most insane statement in the whole article. There is no such thing as a secure and accurate computer. Only one way to completely secure a computer. Turn it off, encase it in a 30ft concrete tomb. Very few will get to it, yet it still isn't totally secure, I'm sure there's a bunker buster out there that'll destroy it.

Accurate? Hardly. A computer will tell you what you program it to. If someone can change it's purpose (or results) you've no longer got accuracy. Note how the comment doesn't question the accuracy of input/output to the computer?

And finally, flying on airplanes. I think history has shown that there is no such thing as a failure-proof aircraft. However, I will still fly on them, because I hope that procedures ensure that it's not Williams flying it with a computer only.

Vip

New security audit methodology?

Are they implying that a computer system is to be considered reliable just because one hacker/group did not find any (more) flaws in one specimen (not even "in the wild") at one given moment in time?
Auguste Kerckhoffs tourne dans sa tombe...
Whether she succeeds or fails does not prove a thing.
Since when do we attribute the most "l33t sk1llz" on earth to the first attacker, and then just assume we're safe to vote happily ever after?
The only route to go for the code that could finally make someone president is full disclosure. "Elected on Open Source" sounds a whole lot better than "four years under the rule of a computer glitch."

Is she crazy?

I wouldn't do that. The next headline will be, "Cracker goes to jail for showing flaws in electronic voting system"...I mean, this is America...home of the patriot act and indefinate imprisonment without cause.

Just wondering....

if an expolit is found and patched, are we supposed to feel our voting is safe?

Do you feel safer every time MS patches their stuff with claims of fixing an exploit? Or how many patches does it take to make the public feel safe?

If a politician or political group wanted to exploit such a system, wouldn't they consider hiring someone familiar with cracking such a system? How would you advertise for such a job and even test the applicants?

If I vote electronicly, does that mean I can also participate in a jury electronicly?

I'm sure I can come up with all sorts of other perspectives but doesn't it all come down to simply controlling what the media reports anyway, and that it can eliminate or bypass any electronic counting system? (i.e. with all the media talking down on the Dixie Chicks, how is it that they are the top selling country band? Or how SCO has been so much in the Media lately about stupid stuff... who should believe the media anyway, no matter what the truth is.)

Point being, what verification do I as a voter get?

A: NONE!

I am expected to believe what someone else tells me the results of an election is.

Don't politicians as a profession lie? Especially in campagining for election? And haven't past elected politicians been found to lie to the public?

Doesn't this really all add up to cheating is OK so long as you do not get caught, or can't talk you way out of it?

There was a delay in responding to the olympic park bombing in 1996. The delay was caused by the program of the then new 911 system. It would not allow an assignment of a call to an officer(s) without inputting a valid address. Problem was, nobody thought to give the park an address, though everyone knew where it was, cept the 911 computer program. The call finally went out over old style walkie talkie to those officers who still had such a device. The delay time was perhaps long enough not to have saved those who died.

Point is, humans are smarter than programs. What we make we can break.... Electronic voting is just another place to manipulate the voting process. Another tool to perhaps convince people to vote for someone that is more likely to do something the voter would not approve of anyway.

But if such a systemn could be validated, then I think it could be used for more than just voting a politician into office, but could also be used to handle the day to day decissions of what politicans and their company do..... like slashdot moderation.... but better, more accurate and perhaps more verifiable to the adverage joe..

Open Source Voting Machine Project

I tried posting a story about the EVM2003 project a couple weeks ago, but unfortunately it was rejected. I'll try again soon, I suppose. So this note is a little less complete (not all the background URLs and the like). The project comes out of several years of background work by some well known computer scientists, political scientists, lawyers, elections officials, and political activists. But the demo (to be written in Python, btw), is just starting development.

Anyway, the short story is that I am involved in a project to create an open source voting system, with the extra twist that the machines also produce printed ballots. That is, the electronic part makes selection more clear, and prevent overvotes and other errors, but after using the touchscreen (or mouse, or blind accomodation), voters can visually verify their ballot for accuracy before submitting it to the ballot box.

Read an announcement of the project at http://gnosis.cx/voting-project/announce.html [gnosis.cx].

Check out the sourceforge page for EVM2003 [sourceforge.net]. We also have a mailing list archive. [python-hosting.com]

Need audit trail... security misses the point

I'm not concerned if the system is secure or not (well, I am, but it is a side point). What I'm concerned about is that I can't audit the computer system without a paper trail. This is the most important issue. One can have a "secure" voting system which purposefully gives the wrong results on election day. Also, just beacuse one hacker can't crack it doesn't mean that other hackers won't.

we need some standards

Another poster says "at least this is a change from the Kevin Mitnick days" (or something similar)

That poster is mistaken. We had a recent story on slashdot where someone was threatened with legal action for revealing a bug in some code.

IMHO there should be standards for how and when you are allowed to attempt to break into a piece of software or system to demonstrate its vulnerability. I suppose one way to go is:

1. find out that it's vulnerable
2. tell the company that you believe it's vulnerable and you'd like their permission to demonstrate that to them then
3. show them how you break in

It's a rather round-about process since you'll usually have to break in (secretly!) in part one to be sure that it really is vulnerable. But you can't let them know you did that or they'll prosecute you in step two. Suggestions?

Idiotic rebuttal #36b -- the "disabled" b.s.

No one is saying get rid of touch screens, we are saying PUT PAPER IN THE PRINTER which is already built into Diebold and every other touch screen machine. Print ballot, voter verified, it goes in a ballot box, you've got evidence of the vote. Explain why: 1) A person in a wheelchair, or a muscular or neurological difficulty, who can vote on a touch screen suddenly cannot vote on a touch screen if you have paper in the printer. 2) A person who is blind, and uses the headphones to vote, suddenly cannot vote on a touch screen using headphones if you have paper in the printer. This is a prepared talking point sent out by the voting machine industry. Bev Harris Black Box Voting

Conflict of Interest

Avi Ruben was probably a fool for not divesting or disclosing his interest in a pseudo-competitor, but why isn't anyone screaming about Senator Chuck Hagel's ownership of Diebold? here's a version of the story. [smirkingchimp.com] But where are the mainstream media accounts of this in relation to Hagel's unprecedented win in Nebraska using election machines his own company sold! And then he apparently failed to disclose this for years.

Frankly, if voting is going to be electronic and this insecure, I'd prefer to vote via the web. Better yet, I'll go vote via Taco Bell.

That's great, but...

If she fails, the vendor, and possibly the election officials, will cite this as "proof" that the system is secure.