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Voting machines are a very hard problem from a security standpoint to solve. So even a well designed and audited voting machine might still not be safe enough t

Voting machines are a very hard problem from a security standpoint to solve. So even a well designed and audited voting machine might still not be safe enough to use when compared with manual voting (which is not perfectly secure, but at least is more generally understood). This, however, is stuff out of a Dilbert cartoon: "The wireless connection uses WEP (which we knew). What we didn’t know is that a few minutes of wireless monitoring showed that the encryption key is “abcde”, and that key is unchangeable"

DanielBMarkham 11y ago
E-voting, at least to me, looks completely idiotic. Why would we trust our most important civic duty, voting, to a collection of hardware that's known to be extremely vulnerable to attacks in every other job we give it? Having said that, I think you could make it work with a paper audit trail that contained both the current vote tally and the current vote -- and was distributed to the person voting at the time they voted. (Then do random audits) (And of course that information would be obscured in some way, perhaps using encryption)
vizeroth 11y ago
Don't forget the hard-wired Administrator password: "admin"... and no logging to let someone know that someone may have removed into the machine and replaced the Access database holding the votes.
gizmo686 11y ago
In fairness, at this point I don't think "abcde" is any less secure of a WEP password then something like "dahslkgjhalgihao". WEP is really broken at this point.
- seanp2k2 11y ago
  Yeah, it just highlights the fact that they didn't even seemingly try to make it secure.
peterwwillis 11y ago
Are ATMs also a hard problem from a security standpoint? Because we have relied on them to exchange currency around the world, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for decades. And they are basically identical in function to a voting machine, except of course for having more functionality. Why don't we just use ATMs as voting machines?
- jeltz 11y ago
  Some of the companies building these horribly insecure voting machines are originally ATM companies, so I do not think we have any reason to think that ATMs are secure. There have also been incidents where ATMs have been hacked. ATMs are also an easier problem since they do not care about anonymity, part of the cryptography is done on the card, and they do not have to work without a netowrk connection.
  - peterwwillis 11y ago
    There's cryptography in a magnetic strip? That's news to me. And sure, some ATMs have been hacked, but in general there's a financial incentive for companies to keep them more secure than not, because, well... it gives you money. And anonymity? The card itself just has a very long string of numbers to identify someone; information about the human it belongs to is optional. Whatever human that is currently verifying if you are allowed to vote can deal with giving you a card to cast your vote; it doesn't actually have to have anything other than a unique number. ATMs only need a network connection to authorize a transaction. All the other aspects of it are offline, and it creates a paper trail, and saves records in memory. They could very easily be reconfigured to display voting options (and instructions!) and record the tallies both in memory and printed, both internally and externally, and OPTIONALLY connect to a remote server to log the transaction - securely, I might add.
    - avn2109 11y ago
      AIUI most ATM's will still give you money up to a couple hundred bucks with their network connection down, in case of legitimate "storm took out the phone lines but people need cash to buy candles and blankets" situations. This is not as sketchy as it sounds because the financial clearing system is only eventually consistent anyway. But obviously this attack surface has been exploited quite a lot by ATM crackers.

DanielBMarkham 11y ago

E-voting, at least to me, looks completely idiotic. Why would we trust our most important civic duty, voting, to a collection of hardware that's known to be extremely vulnerable to attacks in every other job we give it? Having said that, I think you could make it work with a paper audit trail that contained both the current vote tally and the current vote -- and was distributed to the person voting at the time they voted. (Then do random audits) (And of course that information would be obscured in some way, perhaps using encryption)

vizeroth 11y ago

Don't forget the hard-wired Administrator password: "admin"... and no logging to let someone know that someone may have removed into the machine and replaced the Access database holding the votes.

gizmo686 11y ago

In fairness, at this point I don't think "abcde" is any less secure of a WEP password then something like "dahslkgjhalgihao". WEP is really broken at this point.

seanp2k2 11y ago
Yeah, it just highlights the fact that they didn't even seemingly try to make it secure.

peterwwillis 11y ago

Are ATMs also a hard problem from a security standpoint? Because we have relied on them to exchange currency around the world, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for decades. And they are basically identical in function to a voting machine, except of course for having more functionality. Why don't we just use ATMs as voting machines?

jeltz 11y ago
Some of the companies building these horribly insecure voting machines are originally ATM companies, so I do not think we have any reason to think that ATMs are secure. There have also been incidents where ATMs have been hacked. ATMs are also an easier problem since they do not care about anonymity, part of the cryptography is done on the card, and they do not have to work without a netowrk connection.
- peterwwillis 11y ago
  There's cryptography in a magnetic strip? That's news to me. And sure, some ATMs have been hacked, but in general there's a financial incentive for companies to keep them more secure than not, because, well... it gives you money. And anonymity? The card itself just has a very long string of numbers to identify someone; information about the human it belongs to is optional. Whatever human that is currently verifying if you are allowed to vote can deal with giving you a card to cast your vote; it doesn't actually have to have anything other than a unique number. ATMs only need a network connection to authorize a transaction. All the other aspects of it are offline, and it creates a paper trail, and saves records in memory. They could very easily be reconfigured to display voting options (and instructions!) and record the tallies both in memory and printed, both internally and externally, and OPTIONALLY connect to a remote server to log the transaction - securely, I might add.
  - avn2109 11y ago
    AIUI most ATM's will still give you money up to a couple hundred bucks with their network connection down, in case of legitimate "storm took out the phone lines but people need cash to buy candles and blankets" situations. This is not as sketchy as it sounds because the financial clearing system is only eventually consistent anyway. But obviously this attack surface has been exploited quite a lot by ATM crackers.