Brazilian Breaks Secrecy of Brazil's E-Voting Machines With Van Eck Phreaking 157
Posted
by
timothy
from the old-ways-are-best dept.
from the old-ways-are-best dept.
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.
Honestly (Score:2, Insightful)
Whew, that was a close one... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Honestly (Score:5, Insightful)
Easy. Take the machine, hollow them out, put a board in and use their shell as a guard from prying eyes for pen&paper voting. The manufacturers of the machines get the money and we get secure and anonymous voting.
Re:Physical Security (Score:4, Insightful)
If an attacker were able to access the voting location enough to install an unnoticeable antenna, I'd be more concerned with small cameras. Even a large antenna in a nearby building would require somebody watching to see who was using which voting machine, in order to pose any real threat.
Re:Whew, that was a close one... (Score:5, Insightful)
Basically.. all of the reasons you want voting to be done anonymously apply here.
If you can couple the emissions at the location of the machine with the emissions from a particular user - say, their mobile phone's signature - then you can go back to forcing people to vote for X and make sure that they do, roughing them up as an example to the others you told to vote for X if you detected a vote for Y instead, without a need to plant something on them or leaving any trace.
In theory, anyway.
Re:Whew, that was a close one... (Score:3, Insightful)
What's the most someone could do with this exploit?
Uhh.. find out who someone voted for? All you need is two people, one in the polling place and someone else with one of these devices. If I really have to try to convince you of the value of secret votes, I give up.
Re:Whew, that was a close one... (Score:1, Insightful)
exactly, this is hardly news and besides shouldn't they point out that ALL e-voting machines are subject to this very same exploit? (unless they have proven they cannot be of course!)
Re:Whew, that was a close one... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Whew, that was a close one... (Score:1, Insightful)
1 - The machines have batteries.
2 - In Brazil, voting is mandatory, so no one is going home just because of the line. There is almost always a huge line.
Not saying that there is no scenario to disrupt the election. But not these two.
And also, to do something like you say, one would need to "listen" to many machines and to disrupt several that are not in your favour. It would be pretty difficult to hide.
I guess the most "promising" way of tampering with the elections would be trying to mess with the final counting - when they total all the polling stations.
Re:Honestly (Score:5, Insightful)
Low-contrast fonts are probably right out, since you don't want to disenfranchise old folks and others with vision problems.
No technology will prevent that (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Van Eck Phreacking will always exist (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't be silly.
Secret ballot is one of the cornerstones of democracy.
In a secret ballot, you don't get bribed to vote for a particular person because you can
always say you voted for him while voting for him.
Likewise, about getting pressured about voting for someone.
As a person in the infosec field (Score:5, Insightful)
Dumb question... (Score:2, Insightful)
Why does the electronic voting machine have to be a touch screen? Why not a list of the options with buttons with an LED in them that light up when you press the button? The list could be on a separate display next to the buttons but nothing changes therefore the 'van eck phreaker' would only get the data on the screen, not the option picked... but I have no knowledge of this sort of stuff.
Maybe some places do that, but where I live we do vote by mail.
Re:Honestly (Score:4, Insightful)
Exactly. It's pretty safe. This shows that a random citizen is unlikely to give an election to Mickey Mouse on a whim.
Instead it would take someone with significant knowledge and even serious funding to sway an election. Probably not just a someone, but even an organization.
So the only way this could ever effect elections would be if there were an organization or group of conspiring individuals with significant monetary resources - AND for that group of people to feel that swaying an election would be in their interest - AND for that group of people to then be so immoral as to decide to do so.
Clearly such a confluence of conditions is so wildly improbable that we can effectively rule out its possibility.
Re:Honestly (Score:3, Insightful)
(Note to moderators... I'm going for funny here but feel free to mark as 'stupid'.)