Opening Diebold Source, the Hard Way 299
Doc Ruby writes to tell us about an article in the Baltimore (MD) Sun, reporting that someone sent a package to a former legislator containing what appears to be Diebold source code. From the article:
"Diebold Election Systems Inc. expressed alarm and state election officials contacted the FBI yesterday after a former legislator received an anonymous package containing what appears to be the computer code that ran Maryland's polls in 2004... The availability of the code — the written instructions that tell the machines what to do — is important because some computer scientists worry that the machines are vulnerable to malicious and virtually undetectable vote-switching software. An examination of the instructions would enable technology experts to identify flaws, but Diebold says the code is proprietary and does not allow public scrutiny of it." Read on for more of Doc Ruby's comments and questions.
Maryland's primary elections last month were ruined by procedural and tech problems. Maryland used Diebold machines, even though its Republican governor "lost faith" in them as early as February this year, with months to do something about it before Maryland relied on them in their elections.
The Diebold code was secret, and was used in 2002 even though illegally uncertified — even by private analysts under nondisclosure. Now that it's being "opened by force," the first concern from Diebold, the government, and the media is that it could be further exploited by crackers. What if the voting software were open from the beginning, so its security relied only on hard secrets (like passwords and keys), not mere obscurity, which can be destroyed by "leaks" like the one reported by the Sun? The system's reliability would be known, and probably more secure after thorough public review. How much damage does secret source code employed in public service have to cause before we require it to be opened before we buy it, before we base our government on it?
Source code not even needed to hack these machines (Score:5, Informative)
Here's an excerpt:
In a paper last month, "Security Analysis of the Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting Machine," (available at http://itpolicy.princeton.edu/voting/ [princeton.edu]) Princeton computer professor Edward W. Felten and two graduate students Ariel J. Feldman and J. Alex Halderman discussed a common Diebold machine. They showed that anyone who gets access to the machine and its memory card for literally a minute or two could easily install the group's invisible vote-stealing software on the machine. (Poll workers and others have unsupervised access for much longer periods.) Changing all logs, counters, and associated records to reflect the bogus vote count that it generates, the software installed by the infected memory card (similar to a floppy disk) would be undetectable. In fact, the software would delete itself at the end of Election Day.
Re:Source code not even needed to hack these machi (Score:5, Informative)
Elected officials are teh suck (Score:4, Informative)
What he's really saying is, "please, please, please believe that I didn't screw up as badly as it appears I screwed up. Just pretend that the machines are secure, and that democracy as we know it is not in danger."
Politics of Open Source (Score:1, Informative)
Well, those people might not vote in the election either because "It's pointless. Those kids are going to go straight off of my lawn and onto that election-hacking machine of theirs" or "My vote won't count", the latter of which is age-old.
So I agree with the concept making voting open source. In my subjective slippery-slope universe, this will cause news-ussavvy "I voted Democrat since 1948" non-nerds not to vote and have the generally better informed of us vote. (Sounds elitist, I suppose.) Top hackers across the country could review the code for vulnerabilities, instead of us downloading "Diebold Security Patches" every 2 minutes under the current system. I realize that the US government will almost never accept this, but in my opinion it's good anyway, and maybe as secure as a completely hidden source code.
Of course, Diebold would lose profit. But that's a sacrifice they'll have to make for the red, white and blue, for the eagle soaring above, soaring... majestically! and the Americanness (Britishness) of apple pie (cobbler) all those other American cliches.
Re:Source code not even needed to hack these machi (Score:2, Informative)
Voting computers in The Netherlands (Score:4, Informative)
They even posted a security analysis (in English) of the voting computer used in the netherlands http://www.wijvertrouwenstemcomputersniet.nl/othe
Re:I forget the Link... (Score:3, Informative)
Is this the link?
http://www.alternet.org/blogs/video/40755 [alternet.org]
Count em' by hand (Score:3, Informative)
PenGun
Do What Now ???
Re:Source code not even needed to hack these machi (Score:5, Informative)
With paper ballots, you have to come up with a lot of other ballots if you want to stuff the ballot. That takes time, material, and co-conspirators. If you want to destroy ballots, you have to take them out of the box and get rid of them. You might shred, burn, bury them, or throw them in a river. That takes time, and leaves evidence and possibly witnesses. If you want to destroy enough ballots to change an election, you will probably also need co-conspirators, and will need to avoid witnesses.
So anything you do to change a paper election will take a lot of time, resources, and manpower, where as an electronic theft of an entire election is almost instantaneous, with no witness and no evidence *.
* Aside from exit polling.
Re:Disappointed! Period. (Score:5, Informative)
be cautious of a Diebold paper trail - not right! (Score:5, Informative)
I early voted on a Diebold voter verified machine - and it's NOT good enough. I even had a nice conversation with the technical election judge, and since it did print a verified trail I did have to go home and think about this before I realized how it sucked.
They totally and complete circumvented the idea of a voter verified paper trail.
The way this machine works is you vote, it prints, you can see-but-not-touch the printout. You can vote AGAIN (up to 3 times) and it voids the previous printouts. Again, without you touching them. Which means the process expects that some percentage of its paper trail will be voided. The printouts get sent into some magic compartment.
So 1) there's no way except by noise for the election monitors to know if it printed a variety of extra votes. And they were pretty quiet.
2) There's absolutely zero way to know if it went back and voided your vote, because there's plenty of precedent for voiding votes.
3) It can absolutely tell via paper alone who voted in which order; it's on a spool. Which could be easily tracked by anyone who watched what order people voted at that machine. Your votes are even less anonymous.
*sigh*
Life imitating art or vice versa? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Source code not even needed to hack these machi (Score:5, Informative)
To make a long story short, she uploaded the files to an area where technologically savvy people frequent, and said, "Hey guys, take a look at this." The only people that replied were the people willing to take a stand, i.e. the programmers at Princeton.
So, for an "unimportant post", I divulged information that actually happened. You see, after government officials became aware of flaws in the software, they still kept the Diebold machines in their budgets (hundred of millions of dollars in sum, mind you). Huge amounts of money is being spent on machines that have software programmed by douchebags up in Canada. These machines can be telephoned into to be monitored (good ole' Windows RAS). Oh, and the whistle blower lady was harrassed, her house being broken into subsequently and her being monitored by a government agency, which she has had to talk with regularly.
Yep, you trust your election security to software programmed by dumbasses using Microsoft Access as a database. You trust your election security to individuals that are allowed to bring the Diebold machines home with them after elections are conducted. You trust people to count elections who are ex-convicts hired out by contracting firms.
Why? Um, well, because, um, I think they can be trusted? Oh, that sounds sooooo comforting.
Let's ignore the whole issue about suffrage that was fought so hard for.
My only logical conclusion if people can possibly ignore what I just wrote is that they are idiots. I just hope slashdot readers are a set above the curve.
Re:Due diligence--some places practiced it (Score:5, Informative)
My county (Franklin County, Ohio) expressed a "strong preference" for their voting machine vendor to provide the source code to a 3rd party elections systems assessor.
It was not a requirement, but the fact that Diebold wouldn't, but ES&S [essvote.com] would was one of the reason why Franklin County chose the ES&S system.
Keep in mind, there was no directive from the Ohio Secretary of State on this issue, nor a law from the General Assembly requiring it. Franklin County probably has the most concerned and intelligent leadership running its board of elections, and in that regard, establishes great precedence for the other 87 counties, but they are certainly not under obligation to follow its lead.
As a Maryland Election Judge... (Score:5, Informative)
So the deal is, concerned citizens now have to come and babysit elections. We train on all the fine points of who can access the machines and are basically there to watch the Diebold personnel to ensure they don't "patch" the machines at the last minute. It's fucking insane. As you can probably tell, I'm highly suspect of America's status as a democracy anymore, but I'm doing my best to help us recover. I'll give it a few more years, but the state of affairs is pathetic. We seem set to turn our elections over to the corporations that are running our country (and, as a consequence, our foreign and domestic policy). If Americans don't start giving a shit, this country is over.
You say the Diebold source code was put on an FTP (Score:4, Informative)
That's old news
Adam Stubblefield [techtarget.com], a Johns Hopkins University doctoral student, along with Yosh Kohno from the University of California, San Diego, last year produced a report detailing the security problems with Diebold Election Systems' source code after it was left on an open FTP server and eventually leaked to the Internet.
Here's another one:
FalconGary McGraw, CTO of Cigital Inc. [techtarget.com], cited the formerly proprietary code that runs Diebold Election Systems' AccuVote-TX electronic voting machines as an example. A voting activist was able to download the source code from a Diebold FTP site, which led to the exposure of a number of security flaws in the software and widespread questions about the accuracy of the machines and the integrity of votes cast with them.
e-voting (Score:4, Informative)
What we need is legal access to the actual code (+source, compiler, bootstrap process) running on the machines, not an illegal access to a piece of code someone chose to 'leak'.
And more importantly, we need voter-verified paper trail.
India's e-voting seems to be a pretty good system: Learning from India's Electronic Voting System [sepiamutiny.com]
FalconDo you understand what "paper trail" means (Score:3, Informative)