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DEF CON report on vulnerabilities in US election infrastructure [pdf]

546 points by andrewla 8y ago

Klover 8y ago
I was surprised to read that this remote vulnerability is possible in 23 states. I thought that the United States prides itself on its democracy? How come voting machines are possible in a democracy?
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- deathanatos 8y ago
  The voting population doesn't directly control voting machines. I'd say it's a mix between getting a good representative elected, and getting the facts known and actually debated. (In case you're not from the US: our government is largely a representative democracy, not a direct democracy, with a few exceptions, such as California's proposition system.) I would say that voting machines are also a niche issue: whether that's good or not, IDK, but most candidates (I feel) would rather discuss their positions on more mainstream topics such as gun control issues, gay rights, abortion, economics issues (particularly vague economic issues), whether or not we should build a wall, etc. Technology is a rare issue, and even rarer to see a candidate demonstrate an understanding of the facts in the issue.
- mulmen 8y ago
  You're conflating the American idea of democracy with voting. They're only tangentially related. We have one of (maybe the) lowest voter turnout rate and institutionalized voter disenfranchisement is as popular as baseball.
- hvdhh7 8y ago
  This isn't a remote vulnerability, btw. The attach involves picking the lock a and inserting a device to a parallel port.
  - ganoushoreilly 8y ago
    The surprising part of most of these vulnerabilities is they are hardware attacks. I had a talk with someone the other day that said she heard people were hacking votes from iPhones. The over simplification of the topic is doing just as much harm as good. I don't know any security professional that would tell you physical access isn't equal to the ability to hack a device. The reality is subversion of people managing processes is of a higher probability that attacks of the machines themselves. It's also not unique to electronic voting, people are always the weak link in security and will always be the weak link.
    - hvdhh7 8y ago
      The first new attack described in last year's report was that you could DoS a machine by removing its CPU. Which, sure, is something to think about. But it's not what I think people are imagining when you say "voting machine hacking."
      - ganoushoreilly 8y ago
        Right!! It's like saying you could DoS a car by removing it's spark plugs.
texuf 8y ago
The conclusion: Over the last 26 years, DEF CON, and for the last two years, the Voting Village, have operated under two core principles: 1. It is important to derive facts through reason and inquiry rather than blind faith. 2. When we discover new facts, it’s important we share this information with the general public so individuals can decide how best to use the information. We did not make these principles up ourselves. Rather, these principles are the foundation of the Enlightenment, which has guided modern science to achieve the medical, engineering, and IT advances, among others, that underpin the modern world. Since these principles have largely guided the human race toward progress for the last 500 years, we plan to continue to follow them. These principles matter most when we put them into practice. Therefore, it is relevant to ask what new facts all the poking and inquiring into our voting systems has identified since the Voting VIllage was established. Among the dozens of vulnerabilities identified in the last two years, four key DEF CON Voting Village findings are grave and undeniable: 1. Supply Chain Insecurity: The voting machine parts supply chain is global and has essentially no security procedures to determine whether the machine parts are trustworthy or pre-hacked before the machine is assembled. Thus if an adversary compromised chips through the supply chain, they could hack whole classes of machines across the U.S., remotely, all at once. 2. Remote Attacks Proven: Despite insistence the fact that machines are “air gapped” from the Internet protects against all remote attacks, both DEF CON 25 and 26 found exploits to hack machines remotely, requiring physical access to the machine. 3. Hacking Faster Than Voting: This year DEF CON also demonstrated that while, on average, it takes about six minutes to vote, machines in at least 15 states can be hacked with a pen in two minutes. It is thus possible for someone to hack a machine while voting in a polling place on Election Day. 4. Hacks Don’t Get Fixed: Finally, we discovered that even when vendors are told about serious flaws in machines by their customers, those flaws go unfixed.
- ragebol 8y ago
  > it takes about six minutes to vote Why does voting take 6 minutes? I think I used a voting machine maybe once in my life (in the Netherlands and apparently young enough to not have used those more often). Casting a vote on paper is usually checking a box with a red pencil, takes maybe a minute of dealing with the huge sheet of paper with all the candidates. Just curious.
w8rbt 8y ago
Virginia went back to paper ballots and optical ballot scanning several years ago. I think the only drawback to this approach is storing the ballots for X years after an election (takes up space). But, it's far more secure and easy for everyone to do. Just like taking a high school test... pencil in the circle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_scan_voting_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_scan_voting_system
- Klathmon 8y ago
  And IMO they should do away with "optical ballot scanning", and should move to regular humans counting them with their own eyes. An electronic scanning system could easily be vulnerable to many of the same issues that are presented here. Instead, have everyone mark their ballots like normal, then get a bunch of people in a room who all don't trust one another and have them count/tally votes together. Just about everyone that can vote can help count (unlike with electronic counting machines where only a very competent engineer could even begin to audit a machine like that, assuming that they were allowed to even do so), and in places that run elections like this, there is almost never a shortage of people willing to assist counting votes, especially when the election is particularly controversial ("I'm not going to let that [side a] person from screwing over us on [side b]! Let's go get 20 of us there watching to make sure nothing bad is happening!") Voting should be hard, voting should be expensive (for the country, not for individual people). Why "optimize" the one thing that secures our country with alternatives that are less secure, have more points of failure, and are overall less understood both by the voters and by the people using the machines to tally votes?
  - w8rbt 8y ago
    I agree, but the optical scanners are like 1000 times better than wirelessly accessible Windows XP laptops... which is what they replaced. One step at a time ;)
    - Klathmon 8y ago
      That's fair, but it really feels to me like a kind of "token gesture" that makes it seem like it's in good faith (and could actually be done in good faith!) but keeps all the same underlying issues. After all, a lot of those counting machines are proprietary and un-auditable, so you have no way of knowing if they are actually just windows-xp wireless laptops crammed into a fancy plastic case. I don't know enough about it in this situation to know, but things like that can sometimes cause a false sense of security or improvement that can actually make things worse in the long run.
JdeBP 8y ago
Some of the vulnerabilities are, appallingly, mundane multi-user operating system misconfigurations that have been known about since the 1960s and 1970s. The one where simply connecting a serial terminal yields a root login session with no password is particularly egregious.
andrewla 8y ago
Here's a quick summary of the machines that they have reported vulnerabilities in. I've used [ed] to mark where I'm adding relevant content not present in the report. In my non-professional opinion, none of these vulnerabilities seem earth-shattering, although the potential lack of paper trails makes some of the touch-screen systems very dicey. Both of the touch-screen systems have the option of a voter-verified paper trail, but it's not clear how widely those option are deployed. Diebold ExpressPoll-5000 - Use: Used to check in voters at the polling station. - Vulnerabilities: No voting-specific vulnerabilities were found; generally an insecure WinCE machine. Physical access would be needed to compromise. - Impact: Could change voter polls to selectively exclude individuals, forcing them to use provisional ballots. Could add voters to polls potentially, but not clear [ed] if this would pass a cross-reference with upstream voter registry. Dominion AVC Edge - Use: Touch-screen voting machine. Records votes electronically and [ed: has an optional voter-verified paper ballot audit system. Not clear how widely used the paper ballot system is used with this machine.] Verifies voter eligibility with a smart card distributed by poll staff. [ed: Presumably the smart card cross-referenced with the voter rolls during tally.] - Vulnerabilities: Physical vulnerabilities, including swapping out the electronic storage. [ed: Not clear if this would be detected by audits against the smart card registration or voter rolls]. - Impact: Removed or changed votes or completely synthetic votes, [ed: if not cross-referenced; or the storage could be re-written to change or spoil existing votes]. [ed: If paper option is not used, then no audit would be possible if storage is compromised]. Dominion Premier/Diebold AccuVote TSx - Use: Touch-screen voting machine. Records votes electronically and has an optional voter-verified paper ballot system. Verifies eligibility with smart card distributed by poll staff. - Vulnerabilities: Denial-of-service attacks easily available by unplugging a cable. Smart card is supposed to be reset by the machine, but a substitute smart card can be used that allows unlimited votes. [ed Not clear if this would pass a cross-reference with the voter rolls, or if the machine is equipped to allow such an audit.] Malware could be distributed for the device [ed: through unspecified channels]. Such malware would allow an adversary to compromise many machines without requiring physical access to polling stations. - Impact: Removed or changed votes or completely synthetic votes [ed: if not cross-referenced with voter rolls; or malware could be used strictly to change votes and still pass the cross-referencing with voter polls. The user-verified paper option could mitigate some of this, but the malware could theoretically spoil the user-verified ballot and produce a new non-spoiled ballot with a changed vote.] ES&S M650 - Use: Strictly for tallying of paper ballots. - Vulnerabilities: Physical security at the polling place, and network-based attacks in situations where the devices are networked (not at the polling place, but at the clerks office or similar centralized locations). Thought attempts are made on the device to prevent unauthorized software from being installed, there are known vulnerabilities that allow that to be changed, through a serial control port or by modifying the Zip disks (?!) that are used as the underlying file system. - Impact: Changing vote tallies. [ed: An audit would be possible because this machine uses a direct voter-filled-out paper trail].
rotten 8y ago
There are a lot of words in this document. What we need is some infographics that boil it down into something people without the time to read and parse all of those findings can understand easily. A map showing vulnerable states, some pictures showing how easy it is to circumvent a particular system. Something that shows what percentage of machines are vulnerable and an easy way to know if the machines in my district are susceptible without having to wade through pages and pages of text.
- btown 8y ago
  Specifically, this makes the job much easier for non-tech journalists to report on the findings. Consider that Heartbleed practically became a meme due to the discoverers’ creation of a logo and website. If you want to stop the hack, social-hack the fix.
  - whatshisface 8y ago
    >If you want to stop the hack, social-hack the fix. It's a little tangential, but I think this comment is evidence that the verb "hack" has finally completed its evolution into a synonym for "do."
- mattferderer 8y ago
  I would also like to see some things have more details, such as the 11 yr old hacking a mock up of the Florida election website. Was this a true representation of what Florida used or a learning tool with flaws built into it? I feel I could spend well over a week going through trying to learn more about each point made. I've also heard some people claim that a lot of these voting machines are no longer used.
  - mmaunder 8y ago
    It was a learning tool with built in flaws and the kids were coached.
- rthomas6 8y ago
  This is great to say, but just wanting something doesn't get it done. How could we be proactive and accomplish this? I don't have any of the necessary skills, or the audience. This is really important to put attention toward because that is the only way to get those in power to care. How can we find the right people to make digestible press packages about this, and how do we get it published by people?
RanInt1111 8y ago
I wish there were way more transparency on the backgrounds and political leanings of the contributors/authors to the paper. It may not appear to be important whether any one of the authors/participants is or is not part of, e.g., a member of the "resistance" domestic political seditious insurgency that stole it's slogan from Infowars, or part of the organization that the department of homeland security has designated as a domestic terrorist organization called AntiFA (Anti First Amendment); but reality simply is that the nexus of this issue, voting, is very much tied into both of those malignant movements in the USA and both have direct ties to the efforts to disintegrate the USA by nullifying national borders and advancing the invasion of national territories and communities by foreign national citizens of other countries. So any objective and rational and reasonable investigation of the voting issue would demand transparency as to the perspective of these contributors, investigators, and authors ... especially since they are first and foremost also active in the suppression of free speech all over the internet, including here. You didn't see any discussion of the singularly biggest vulnerability to the US elections system of all ... foreign national citizens being in the USA and thereby counted in the census, which determined seats in the House of Representatives among other things like money and even the Presidential electoral college vote, which thereby inherently defrauds American citizens of seats in the House that are given to states that harbor illegal foreign nationals. Americans are literally being defrauded of control of their own government by illegal foreign nationals that have invaded the USA. There is no other way to describe it than invasion, the takeover of power by a foreign power against the will of the resident population ... invasion.
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carrja99 8y ago
That's why you research and read before you go. Otherwise you'll wind up voting yes to "Proposition B: Unlimited Internet Freedom" which does something possibly disastrous despite the title. Because that's how Republicans roll.
- Cthulhu_ 8y ago
  Oh wow, did they really call it that? I mean it's not wrong, the net neutrality debate is about deregulating the internet by the government so that the ISPs can regulate it. But you have to know what more freedom for ISPs can entail. I mean if it was called Unlimited Gun Use Freedom it could be a name for legalized murder.
  - carrja99 8y ago
    I totally made it up, but it's not far. For example, here in MO they put a ballot initiative titled "Right to Farm" on the ballot and advertised it as "we're protecting your right to farm! Standing up for the small family farmers!" when in reality it keeps people from having standing to sue a factory farm when runoff from a pig farm pollutes their land.
    - gumby 8y ago
      After California Prop 8 (vote for gay marriage! Where "yes" meant "prohibit it" and "no" meant "don't prohibit it") California adopted a measure where the AG has to verify that ballot measure titles are neutral.
      - sbov 8y ago
        The name of the prop actually wasn't confusing. Initially it was called "California Marriage Protection Act", which is pretty common for anti-gay-marriage acts. Later it was called "Eliminate Rights of Same Sex Couples to Marry". Which is 100% obvious. Only people who lazily called it the "gay marriage prop" were confused.
kadendogthing 8y ago
From the "Next Steps" section in the report: >Congress Must Fund Election Security: National defense is not the role of state and local government. Further, no state or local government will ever be able to raise enough capital to defend itself from a determined nation state. Thus, having codified the basic security standards developed by local election officials above, Congress must finance the implementation of these security standards. Well. We tried: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/republicans-block-bid-to-extend-election-security-grants https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/republicans-block-bid-...
- zackmorris 8y ago
  I was just going to post that. I'm concerned that since election security is not (just) a technological problem, that very little will be done to improve it in the foreseeable future. I'm from Idaho which is currently conservative by close to a 2/3 majority, but remember growing up that we had many liberal elected officials like Cecil Andrus and Frank Church. From my perspective, democrats are working to improve election security while republicans are not. Is this simply a partisan issue? Does anyone from more liberal states have examples of democrats opposing election security? If so - then how do we work to improve election security when our elected officials refuse to? If not - then how do we accomplish reforms within the republican party or make election reforms into political capital that it might be willing to trade for?
  - explainplease 8y ago
    > From my perspective, democrats are working to improve election security while republicans are not. Does voter ID improve election security? Which party opposes voter ID laws?
    - kadendogthing 8y ago
      >Does voter ID improve election security? It does not.
      - 8y ago
liftbigweights 8y ago
Really don't like how political and advocative DefCon has gotten. Finding and publishing vulnerabilities is fine. But DefCon shouldn't be advocating policy or fixes. That should be left to the government, businesses, etc. The more defcon mixes with authorities, the better.
- Skrillex 8y ago
  If [the government, businesses, etc.] could not (or did not) find these vulnerabilities, most of which seem like things your average techie might have checked for, what evidence is there to suggest that [the government, businesses, etc.] know how to fix them either?
  - ganoushoreilly 8y ago
    The same could be said for any system where a vulnerability is found. Vulnerabilities exist, it's the efforts we put into addressing them that matters. Yelling about one party or the other being responsible won't solve the problem. The first steps to a big fix would simply be locking down processes, things that can be done by volunteers joining in the efforts of their local and or state voting agencies. It's easy to sit on the sides lines and say this and that are wrong, I'd rather see more people standing up and trying to find solutions that work. I volunteer and we are always short and no one every seems to "have the time". The quality of candidates that do volunteer are all over and would have far greater an impact with more tech exposed individuals instead of the common retirees that I work with.
    - Skrillex 8y ago
      I cannot tell from the wording of the comment, but this seems like a rebuttal. I agree that solutions should be the first thing that happens as opposed to blaming. However, the comment that I replied to seemed to be stating that the solutions should be left to the first order victims of the exploits (which I am stating is nonsense) and that the DEFCON participants had no place in offering solutions.
artemisyna 8y ago
Any likelihood we could get some white hat hackers on this... Including marking things on the day of, if necessary?
- deadmik3 8y ago
  be careful what you wish for, one man's white hat is another man's black hat
mrnobody_67 8y ago
This is terrifying. Full stop.
- ganoushoreilly 8y ago
  Every electronic device is hackable with physical access. Every process that has humans involved is exploitable. I'm more alarmed at the number of people willing to complain and moan about change, yet refuse to volunteer at their local polling station. If awareness is important, we have to start somewhere, yet the vast majority of people complaining expect it to just solve itself. Sometimes to fix a broken system you have to become a part of it and change from the inside.
  - TheDong 8y ago
    > Every electronic device is hackable with physical access. Every process that has humans involved is exploitable. This is a useless statement. Security is a continuum, and it's perfectly valid to point out voting machines suck on that continuum. I store my private key on a yubikey, and sure if you had physical access and spent about $300k you could decap it and recover the private key (with a success rate of maybe 10%, an expensive hardware lab, and expertise only a handful of people have). That's a whole different ballpark from voting machines which don't use a hardware TPM [0] to attest votes, but instead store them in csvs while running windows CE such that an attacker with a jumpdrive can plug it in and alter records using exploits which have been public for years and years. > Sometimes to fix a broken system you have to become a part of it and change from the inside. Unfortunately, various people have tried to change it with no success. The voting machine companies have contracts with the government that preclude new entrants to the business. Security researchers who contact voting machine companies have no impact. Technology such as TPMs exist, but the voting machine vendors have little apparent interest in these new ideas and technologies. I don't think it's fair to discount other commentors from providing information and discussing their views just because they're unwilling to go into politics to attempt to fix this silly government contracts (with a low chance of succeeding) [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Platform_Module https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Platform_Module
sebleon 8y ago
This is a lot like consumer cryptography - yes, technical exploits are a problem, but they're overshadowed by social engineering. In the case of US elections - even with secure infrastructure, the election will be determined by billionaire-sponsored campaign budgets and policies that entrench the 2 party system. After the DNC email leak, I'm amazed how little attention was placed on hard evidence that the Democratic Party methodically sabotaged candidates in the primaries. Shifting public focus to the "Russian Hacking" was amazing PR work.
outworlder 8y ago
> A second critical vulnerability in the same machine was disclosed to the vendor a decade ago, yet that machine, which was used into 2016, still contains the flaw. Sometimes I wonder how some people manage to keep their jobs, and how companies manage to keep their contracts. This is gross negligence.
noetic_techy 8y ago
I remember when people were laughed at thought of as cooks and quacks if they claimed voting machines were easily hack-able.
ergothus 8y ago
With partisanship rising to bitter, angry levels in the US while trust in just about every social group on the decline outside of the record defenders, my nightmare scenario has been a contested election result. Having no way to establish to friend, neutral third parties if there was/was not fraud means we can only rely on people's trust in each other to find a reasonable solution. That seems unlikely to end well right now., so all I can hope for is that we dont have such results.
shekelstien 8y ago
All this fear of foreign hacks when voter fraud is a big issue. By that I mean dead people voting, vote counting, foreign nationals voting and tampering at the polls. Whatever. We can ignore that and follow media narratives on foreign hacking instead...
538Hack 8y ago
Combine modern polling data/models with these exploits and the hackers would only have to target a dozen counties(?) to change the outcome of the presidential election because of the how the Electoral College works. ( This is a guess. Trump won in 2016 by 107k votes across 3 states - inside those states how many counties were actually "swingy"? https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/2016-election/swing-state-margins/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/2016-electi...)
dirtylowprofile 8y ago
During the last 2016 automated elections here in the Philippines, the company responsible for it was Smartmatic and just found out their source code was licensed by Dominion. Now finding out that Dominion's equipments mentioned here is a little bit worrying. There was also an incident during our elections hours before a voting machine was accessed just because they have to change a single letter. It is still disturbing to this day.
reversengineer 8y ago
It is an absolute farce that there are electronic voting machines in use which are closed-source.

546 points by andrewla 8y ago

I was surprised to read that this remote vulnerability is possible in 23 states. I thought that the United States prides itself on its democracy? How come voting machines are possible in a democracy?

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deathanatos 8y ago
The voting population doesn't directly control voting machines. I'd say it's a mix between getting a good representative elected, and getting the facts known and actually debated. (In case you're not from the US: our government is largely a representative democracy, not a direct democracy, with a few exceptions, such as California's proposition system.) I would say that voting machines are also a niche issue: whether that's good or not, IDK, but most candidates (I feel) would rather discuss their positions on more mainstream topics such as gun control issues, gay rights, abortion, economics issues (particularly vague economic issues), whether or not we should build a wall, etc. Technology is a rare issue, and even rarer to see a candidate demonstrate an understanding of the facts in the issue.
mulmen 8y ago
You're conflating the American idea of democracy with voting. They're only tangentially related. We have one of (maybe the) lowest voter turnout rate and institutionalized voter disenfranchisement is as popular as baseball.
hvdhh7 8y ago
This isn't a remote vulnerability, btw. The attach involves picking the lock a and inserting a device to a parallel port.
- ganoushoreilly 8y ago
  The surprising part of most of these vulnerabilities is they are hardware attacks. I had a talk with someone the other day that said she heard people were hacking votes from iPhones. The over simplification of the topic is doing just as much harm as good. I don't know any security professional that would tell you physical access isn't equal to the ability to hack a device. The reality is subversion of people managing processes is of a higher probability that attacks of the machines themselves. It's also not unique to electronic voting, people are always the weak link in security and will always be the weak link.
  - hvdhh7 8y ago
    The first new attack described in last year's report was that you could DoS a machine by removing its CPU. Which, sure, is something to think about. But it's not what I think people are imagining when you say "voting machine hacking."
    - ganoushoreilly 8y ago
      Right!! It's like saying you could DoS a car by removing it's spark plugs.

texuf 8y ago

The conclusion: Over the last 26 years, DEF CON, and for the last two years, the Voting Village, have operated under two core principles: 1. It is important to derive facts through reason and inquiry rather than blind faith. 2. When we discover new facts, it’s important we share this information with the general public so individuals can decide how best to use the information. We did not make these principles up ourselves. Rather, these principles are the foundation of the Enlightenment, which has guided modern science to achieve the medical, engineering, and IT advances, among others, that underpin the modern world. Since these principles have largely guided the human race toward progress for the last 500 years, we plan to continue to follow them. These principles matter most when we put them into practice. Therefore, it is relevant to ask what new facts all the poking and inquiring into our voting systems has identified since the Voting VIllage was established. Among the dozens of vulnerabilities identified in the last two years, four key DEF CON Voting Village findings are grave and undeniable: 1. Supply Chain Insecurity: The voting machine parts supply chain is global and has essentially no security procedures to determine whether the machine parts are trustworthy or pre-hacked before the machine is assembled. Thus if an adversary compromised chips through the supply chain, they could hack whole classes of machines across the U.S., remotely, all at once. 2. Remote Attacks Proven: Despite insistence the fact that machines are “air gapped” from the Internet protects against all remote attacks, both DEF CON 25 and 26 found exploits to hack machines remotely, requiring physical access to the machine. 3. Hacking Faster Than Voting: This year DEF CON also demonstrated that while, on average, it takes about six minutes to vote, machines in at least 15 states can be hacked with a pen in two minutes. It is thus possible for someone to hack a machine while voting in a polling place on Election Day. 4. Hacks Don’t Get Fixed: Finally, we discovered that even when vendors are told about serious flaws in machines by their customers, those flaws go unfixed.

ragebol 8y ago
> it takes about six minutes to vote Why does voting take 6 minutes? I think I used a voting machine maybe once in my life (in the Netherlands and apparently young enough to not have used those more often). Casting a vote on paper is usually checking a box with a red pencil, takes maybe a minute of dealing with the huge sheet of paper with all the candidates. Just curious.

w8rbt 8y ago

Virginia went back to paper ballots and optical ballot scanning several years ago. I think the only drawback to this approach is storing the ballots for X years after an election (takes up space). But, it's far more secure and easy for everyone to do. Just like taking a high school test... pencil in the circle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_scan_voting_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_scan_voting_system

Klathmon 8y ago
And IMO they should do away with "optical ballot scanning", and should move to regular humans counting them with their own eyes. An electronic scanning system could easily be vulnerable to many of the same issues that are presented here. Instead, have everyone mark their ballots like normal, then get a bunch of people in a room who all don't trust one another and have them count/tally votes together. Just about everyone that can vote can help count (unlike with electronic counting machines where only a very competent engineer could even begin to audit a machine like that, assuming that they were allowed to even do so), and in places that run elections like this, there is almost never a shortage of people willing to assist counting votes, especially when the election is particularly controversial ("I'm not going to let that [side a] person from screwing over us on [side b]! Let's go get 20 of us there watching to make sure nothing bad is happening!") Voting should be hard, voting should be expensive (for the country, not for individual people). Why "optimize" the one thing that secures our country with alternatives that are less secure, have more points of failure, and are overall less understood both by the voters and by the people using the machines to tally votes?
- w8rbt 8y ago
  I agree, but the optical scanners are like 1000 times better than wirelessly accessible Windows XP laptops... which is what they replaced. One step at a time ;)
  - Klathmon 8y ago
    That's fair, but it really feels to me like a kind of "token gesture" that makes it seem like it's in good faith (and could actually be done in good faith!) but keeps all the same underlying issues. After all, a lot of those counting machines are proprietary and un-auditable, so you have no way of knowing if they are actually just windows-xp wireless laptops crammed into a fancy plastic case. I don't know enough about it in this situation to know, but things like that can sometimes cause a false sense of security or improvement that can actually make things worse in the long run.

JdeBP 8y ago

Some of the vulnerabilities are, appallingly, mundane multi-user operating system misconfigurations that have been known about since the 1960s and 1970s. The one where simply connecting a serial terminal yields a root login session with no password is particularly egregious.

andrewla 8y ago

Here's a quick summary of the machines that they have reported vulnerabilities in. I've used [ed] to mark where I'm adding relevant content not present in the report. In my non-professional opinion, none of these vulnerabilities seem earth-shattering, although the potential lack of paper trails makes some of the touch-screen systems very dicey. Both of the touch-screen systems have the option of a voter-verified paper trail, but it's not clear how widely those option are deployed. Diebold ExpressPoll-5000 - Use: Used to check in voters at the polling station. - Vulnerabilities: No voting-specific vulnerabilities were found; generally an insecure WinCE machine. Physical access would be needed to compromise. - Impact: Could change voter polls to selectively exclude individuals, forcing them to use provisional ballots. Could add voters to polls potentially, but not clear [ed] if this would pass a cross-reference with upstream voter registry. Dominion AVC Edge - Use: Touch-screen voting machine. Records votes electronically and [ed: has an optional voter-verified paper ballot audit system. Not clear how widely used the paper ballot system is used with this machine.] Verifies voter eligibility with a smart card distributed by poll staff. [ed: Presumably the smart card cross-referenced with the voter rolls during tally.] - Vulnerabilities: Physical vulnerabilities, including swapping out the electronic storage. [ed: Not clear if this would be detected by audits against the smart card registration or voter rolls]. - Impact: Removed or changed votes or completely synthetic votes, [ed: if not cross-referenced; or the storage could be re-written to change or spoil existing votes]. [ed: If paper option is not used, then no audit would be possible if storage is compromised]. Dominion Premier/Diebold AccuVote TSx - Use: Touch-screen voting machine. Records votes electronically and has an optional voter-verified paper ballot system. Verifies eligibility with smart card distributed by poll staff. - Vulnerabilities: Denial-of-service attacks easily available by unplugging a cable. Smart card is supposed to be reset by the machine, but a substitute smart card can be used that allows unlimited votes. [ed Not clear if this would pass a cross-reference with the voter rolls, or if the machine is equipped to allow such an audit.] Malware could be distributed for the device [ed: through unspecified channels]. Such malware would allow an adversary to compromise many machines without requiring physical access to polling stations. - Impact: Removed or changed votes or completely synthetic votes [ed: if not cross-referenced with voter rolls; or malware could be used strictly to change votes and still pass the cross-referencing with voter polls. The user-verified paper option could mitigate some of this, but the malware could theoretically spoil the user-verified ballot and produce a new non-spoiled ballot with a changed vote.] ES&S M650 - Use: Strictly for tallying of paper ballots. - Vulnerabilities: Physical security at the polling place, and network-based attacks in situations where the devices are networked (not at the polling place, but at the clerks office or similar centralized locations). Thought attempts are made on the device to prevent unauthorized software from being installed, there are known vulnerabilities that allow that to be changed, through a serial control port or by modifying the Zip disks (?!) that are used as the underlying file system. - Impact: Changing vote tallies. [ed: An audit would be possible because this machine uses a direct voter-filled-out paper trail].

rotten 8y ago

There are a lot of words in this document. What we need is some infographics that boil it down into something people without the time to read and parse all of those findings can understand easily. A map showing vulnerable states, some pictures showing how easy it is to circumvent a particular system. Something that shows what percentage of machines are vulnerable and an easy way to know if the machines in my district are susceptible without having to wade through pages and pages of text.

btown 8y ago
Specifically, this makes the job much easier for non-tech journalists to report on the findings. Consider that Heartbleed practically became a meme due to the discoverers’ creation of a logo and website. If you want to stop the hack, social-hack the fix.
- whatshisface 8y ago
  >If you want to stop the hack, social-hack the fix. It's a little tangential, but I think this comment is evidence that the verb "hack" has finally completed its evolution into a synonym for "do."
mattferderer 8y ago
I would also like to see some things have more details, such as the 11 yr old hacking a mock up of the Florida election website. Was this a true representation of what Florida used or a learning tool with flaws built into it? I feel I could spend well over a week going through trying to learn more about each point made. I've also heard some people claim that a lot of these voting machines are no longer used.
- mmaunder 8y ago
  It was a learning tool with built in flaws and the kids were coached.
rthomas6 8y ago
This is great to say, but just wanting something doesn't get it done. How could we be proactive and accomplish this? I don't have any of the necessary skills, or the audience. This is really important to put attention toward because that is the only way to get those in power to care. How can we find the right people to make digestible press packages about this, and how do we get it published by people?

RanInt1111 8y ago

I wish there were way more transparency on the backgrounds and political leanings of the contributors/authors to the paper. It may not appear to be important whether any one of the authors/participants is or is not part of, e.g., a member of the "resistance" domestic political seditious insurgency that stole it's slogan from Infowars, or part of the organization that the department of homeland security has designated as a domestic terrorist organization called AntiFA (Anti First Amendment); but reality simply is that the nexus of this issue, voting, is very much tied into both of those malignant movements in the USA and both have direct ties to the efforts to disintegrate the USA by nullifying national borders and advancing the invasion of national territories and communities by foreign national citizens of other countries. So any objective and rational and reasonable investigation of the voting issue would demand transparency as to the perspective of these contributors, investigators, and authors ... especially since they are first and foremost also active in the suppression of free speech all over the internet, including here. You didn't see any discussion of the singularly biggest vulnerability to the US elections system of all ... foreign national citizens being in the USA and thereby counted in the census, which determined seats in the House of Representatives among other things like money and even the Presidential electoral college vote, which thereby inherently defrauds American citizens of seats in the House that are given to states that harbor illegal foreign nationals. Americans are literally being defrauded of control of their own government by illegal foreign nationals that have invaded the USA. There is no other way to describe it than invasion, the takeover of power by a foreign power against the will of the resident population ... invasion.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

carrja99 8y ago

That's why you research and read before you go. Otherwise you'll wind up voting yes to "Proposition B: Unlimited Internet Freedom" which does something possibly disastrous despite the title. Because that's how Republicans roll.

Cthulhu_ 8y ago
Oh wow, did they really call it that? I mean it's not wrong, the net neutrality debate is about deregulating the internet by the government so that the ISPs can regulate it. But you have to know what more freedom for ISPs can entail. I mean if it was called Unlimited Gun Use Freedom it could be a name for legalized murder.
- carrja99 8y ago
  I totally made it up, but it's not far. For example, here in MO they put a ballot initiative titled "Right to Farm" on the ballot and advertised it as "we're protecting your right to farm! Standing up for the small family farmers!" when in reality it keeps people from having standing to sue a factory farm when runoff from a pig farm pollutes their land.
  - gumby 8y ago
    After California Prop 8 (vote for gay marriage! Where "yes" meant "prohibit it" and "no" meant "don't prohibit it") California adopted a measure where the AG has to verify that ballot measure titles are neutral.
    - sbov 8y ago
      The name of the prop actually wasn't confusing. Initially it was called "California Marriage Protection Act", which is pretty common for anti-gay-marriage acts. Later it was called "Eliminate Rights of Same Sex Couples to Marry". Which is 100% obvious. Only people who lazily called it the "gay marriage prop" were confused.

kadendogthing 8y ago

From the "Next Steps" section in the report: >Congress Must Fund Election Security: National defense is not the role of state and local government. Further, no state or local government will ever be able to raise enough capital to defend itself from a determined nation state. Thus, having codified the basic security standards developed by local election officials above, Congress must finance the implementation of these security standards. Well. We tried: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/republicans-block-bid-to-extend-election-security-grants https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/republicans-block-bid-...

zackmorris 8y ago
I was just going to post that. I'm concerned that since election security is not (just) a technological problem, that very little will be done to improve it in the foreseeable future. I'm from Idaho which is currently conservative by close to a 2/3 majority, but remember growing up that we had many liberal elected officials like Cecil Andrus and Frank Church. From my perspective, democrats are working to improve election security while republicans are not. Is this simply a partisan issue? Does anyone from more liberal states have examples of democrats opposing election security? If so - then how do we work to improve election security when our elected officials refuse to? If not - then how do we accomplish reforms within the republican party or make election reforms into political capital that it might be willing to trade for?
- explainplease 8y ago
  > From my perspective, democrats are working to improve election security while republicans are not. Does voter ID improve election security? Which party opposes voter ID laws?
  - kadendogthing 8y ago
    >Does voter ID improve election security? It does not.
    - 8y ago

liftbigweights 8y ago

Really don't like how political and advocative DefCon has gotten. Finding and publishing vulnerabilities is fine. But DefCon shouldn't be advocating policy or fixes. That should be left to the government, businesses, etc. The more defcon mixes with authorities, the better.

Skrillex 8y ago
If [the government, businesses, etc.] could not (or did not) find these vulnerabilities, most of which seem like things your average techie might have checked for, what evidence is there to suggest that [the government, businesses, etc.] know how to fix them either?
- ganoushoreilly 8y ago
  The same could be said for any system where a vulnerability is found. Vulnerabilities exist, it's the efforts we put into addressing them that matters. Yelling about one party or the other being responsible won't solve the problem. The first steps to a big fix would simply be locking down processes, things that can be done by volunteers joining in the efforts of their local and or state voting agencies. It's easy to sit on the sides lines and say this and that are wrong, I'd rather see more people standing up and trying to find solutions that work. I volunteer and we are always short and no one every seems to "have the time". The quality of candidates that do volunteer are all over and would have far greater an impact with more tech exposed individuals instead of the common retirees that I work with.
  - Skrillex 8y ago
    I cannot tell from the wording of the comment, but this seems like a rebuttal. I agree that solutions should be the first thing that happens as opposed to blaming. However, the comment that I replied to seemed to be stating that the solutions should be left to the first order victims of the exploits (which I am stating is nonsense) and that the DEFCON participants had no place in offering solutions.

artemisyna 8y ago

Any likelihood we could get some white hat hackers on this... Including marking things on the day of, if necessary?

deadmik3 8y ago
be careful what you wish for, one man's white hat is another man's black hat

mrnobody_67 8y ago

This is terrifying. Full stop.

ganoushoreilly 8y ago
Every electronic device is hackable with physical access. Every process that has humans involved is exploitable. I'm more alarmed at the number of people willing to complain and moan about change, yet refuse to volunteer at their local polling station. If awareness is important, we have to start somewhere, yet the vast majority of people complaining expect it to just solve itself. Sometimes to fix a broken system you have to become a part of it and change from the inside.
- TheDong 8y ago
  > Every electronic device is hackable with physical access. Every process that has humans involved is exploitable. This is a useless statement. Security is a continuum, and it's perfectly valid to point out voting machines suck on that continuum. I store my private key on a yubikey, and sure if you had physical access and spent about $300k you could decap it and recover the private key (with a success rate of maybe 10%, an expensive hardware lab, and expertise only a handful of people have). That's a whole different ballpark from voting machines which don't use a hardware TPM [0] to attest votes, but instead store them in csvs while running windows CE such that an attacker with a jumpdrive can plug it in and alter records using exploits which have been public for years and years. > Sometimes to fix a broken system you have to become a part of it and change from the inside. Unfortunately, various people have tried to change it with no success. The voting machine companies have contracts with the government that preclude new entrants to the business. Security researchers who contact voting machine companies have no impact. Technology such as TPMs exist, but the voting machine vendors have little apparent interest in these new ideas and technologies. I don't think it's fair to discount other commentors from providing information and discussing their views just because they're unwilling to go into politics to attempt to fix this silly government contracts (with a low chance of succeeding) [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Platform_Module https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Platform_Module

sebleon 8y ago

This is a lot like consumer cryptography - yes, technical exploits are a problem, but they're overshadowed by social engineering. In the case of US elections - even with secure infrastructure, the election will be determined by billionaire-sponsored campaign budgets and policies that entrench the 2 party system. After the DNC email leak, I'm amazed how little attention was placed on hard evidence that the Democratic Party methodically sabotaged candidates in the primaries. Shifting public focus to the "Russian Hacking" was amazing PR work.

outworlder 8y ago

> A second critical vulnerability in the same machine was disclosed to the vendor a decade ago, yet that machine, which was used into 2016, still contains the flaw. Sometimes I wonder how some people manage to keep their jobs, and how companies manage to keep their contracts. This is gross negligence.

noetic_techy 8y ago

I remember when people were laughed at thought of as cooks and quacks if they claimed voting machines were easily hack-able.

ergothus 8y ago

With partisanship rising to bitter, angry levels in the US while trust in just about every social group on the decline outside of the record defenders, my nightmare scenario has been a contested election result. Having no way to establish to friend, neutral third parties if there was/was not fraud means we can only rely on people's trust in each other to find a reasonable solution. That seems unlikely to end well right now., so all I can hope for is that we dont have such results.

shekelstien 8y ago

All this fear of foreign hacks when voter fraud is a big issue. By that I mean dead people voting, vote counting, foreign nationals voting and tampering at the polls. Whatever. We can ignore that and follow media narratives on foreign hacking instead...

538Hack 8y ago

Combine modern polling data/models with these exploits and the hackers would only have to target a dozen counties(?) to change the outcome of the presidential election because of the how the Electoral College works. ( This is a guess. Trump won in 2016 by 107k votes across 3 states - inside those states how many counties were actually "swingy"? https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/2016-election/swing-state-margins/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/2016-electi...)

dirtylowprofile 8y ago

During the last 2016 automated elections here in the Philippines, the company responsible for it was Smartmatic and just found out their source code was licensed by Dominion. Now finding out that Dominion's equipments mentioned here is a little bit worrying. There was also an incident during our elections hours before a voting machine was accessed just because they have to change a single letter. It is still disturbing to this day.

reversengineer 8y ago

It is an absolute farce that there are electronic voting machines in use which are closed-source.