Brazilian Breaks Secrecy of Brazil's E-Voting Machines With Van Eck Phreaking 157
After the report last week that Brazil's e-voting machines had withstood the scrutiny of a team of invited hackers, reader ateu writes with news that a hacker has shown that the Linux-based voting machines aren't perfectly safe; he was able to eavesdrop on them (translated from Portuguese) by means of Van Eck phreaking.
Re:Honestly (Score:3, Informative)
Not much really. While it is possible to effectively protect a device from such snooping it is very expensive due to the testing and handling requirements. I don't see it on the link but I think there is a commercial Tempest standard.
http://www.eskimo.com/~joelm/tempestintro.html [eskimo.com]
The page has good info and you can try the anti-Tempest fonts for a grin. It's based on the paper also referenced on that page.
This happened with the Dutch in 2006 (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Honestly (Score:4, Informative)
Of course, use LCDs, as the CRT circuitry is the bad one.
Wikipedia would disagree [wikipedia.org] with an annoying PDF [cam.ac.uk].
Re:Dumb question... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Honestly (Score:5, Informative)
Exactly so.
The equipment to carry out this snooping is easily spotted, and more easily foiled.
With more than one voting station in the room, said eaves dropper could never distinguish one vote from the other, and could certainly not CHANGE the results.
You would be better able to guess how persons voted by the color of their tie. http://www.tie-necktie-video.com/tie-color.html [tie-necktie-video.com]
Re:Honestly (Score:1, Informative)
There are two pictures in wikipedia. [wikipedia.org] I've been voting on these since I was 16, there's no touchscreen, just a grayscale LCD and a numeric keypad with braille marks and aditional keys to confirm, cancel or choose NOTA (none of the above), aka "votar em branco" (in Brazil voting is mandatory).
Re:Honestly (Score:3, Informative)
Good pictures. It looks like a newer version could be made to limit the emissions quite nicely. It might also be possible to retrofit the existing machines with shielding including a false front to extend the keypad buttons (but not the switches) through the shield.
At the busiest polling places it probably wouldn't be as much problem as many people would be using many identical machines at once. It would be hard to know who did what.
A tone generator connected to a transmitter might be able to simply jam the signals as well saving a redesign.
Re:Dumb question... (Score:3, Informative)
because here in brasil we don't have voting districts, so in state and federal elections, a candidate from santos (a sea-side city in sao paulo state, some 80 km east of the state capital) can receive votes from people in ribeirão preto (a city 400 km west of the capital). this makes the candidate lists for federal and state deputies something in the thousands.
our voting system uses numbers. each party is assigned a number (ex. PP=11, PDT=12, PT=13, etc.) and every candidate have a number prefixed with the party number (we don't have "independant" candidates. to run for anything you need to join a party). so when you go to the voting booth, you just type the candidate numbers, one candidate per screen. usually the screen order is:
- president
- governor
- senator (one screen when only one seat is in dispute, 2 screens otherwise)
- federal deputy
- state deputy
federal and state elections are held every four years and always coincide. municipal elections are held separatelly in between federal/state elections. the screen order is usually:
- mayor
- municipal legislator (vereador in portuguese).
Electronic voting in the largest democracy (Score:2, Informative)
Canadian vs. US votying (Score:1, Informative)
This is why I love the Canadian method: paper with circles, make an "X" in the circle you want, fold the paper and put it in the ballot box.
I'm in Canada, and am fairly happy with the way things work here, but this method may not work everywhere. Specifically for the US, they tend for almost everything.
First off, when we have an election / voting day, it's generally for one thing only: either municipal, or provincial (like state), or federal. We also have a lot more appointed "bureaucratic" positions: judges and sheriffs are not elected, nor are Crown prosecutors (DAs).
In the US, when you go into an voting booth it's usually on "Election Day", and where you vote for: city, county, state, federal, judges (all of them), sheriff, district attorney, chief dog catcher, etc. At the end of the night you have to count all off those different ballots, whereas in Canada you only have to count the ballot for one election.
There are times when two elections (e.g., city and province) are run at the same time, but it's rare. At most if there's a major political debate there may also be a referendum (like a US proposition), but those are fairly rare (maybe one a decade or so). Usually they involve a Constitutional amendment, or more recently in Ontario and BC (2007, 2005), a change to the way voting is done (from first-past-the-post to proportional representation).
Re:This happened with the Dutch in 2006 (Score:2, Informative)
You seem to think that paper voting systems by neccessity depend on transporting all the ballots to a central location, where they'll be counted.
This is how paper voting works in Sweden. [www.val.se]
To summarize and simplify:
It goes without saying that Sweden is not directly comparable to Brazil, but consider this for a moment. It doesn't require all ballots to be hand-delivered to a central location where they will be counted - it's scalable. And no less secure than electronic voting. Probably just as secure technically, and more secure in practice, because it's easier to see when funny stuff happens to ballots in boxes than when bits are flipped.