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Researchers overlook more important issue. As the government controls the servers, it can impersonate any number of users. Users submit an application to vote
by codedokode 7y ago
Researchers overlook more important issue. As the government controls the servers, it can impersonate any number of users.
Users submit an application to vote remotely through a government-controlled site and confirm it by receiving a SMS with code. It is obvious that government is able to submit such an application to its own server without bothering the real user.
The users vote remotely and confirm their identity by providing a code from SMS (again) and the government can just look at the code on the server. It isn't important what cryptography is used there. You don't need to guess random numbers when you have root access to the server.
The observers are supposed to see a tape where some hashes will be printed when someone votes. Maybe they will be allowed to see the registry of voters who chose to vote remotely, maybe they will not be allowed.
I cannot prove this, and this is my personal opinion, so you shouldn't believe me, but I think the government wants an opaque procedure to produce legitimate looking election results with desired outcome. With paper voting, there are too many points of failure: it is difficult to throw the ballots in the box when there is a vigilant observer. Remote voting doesn't have such flaws.
If there was a fraud, it would be difficult to explain to a non-programmer. They don't understand anything, they just see how the program says "hash doesn't match". But maybe it is just a program written by foreign agents (and stored on foreign "Github" servers) producing fake results. For comparison, with paper voting anyone can understand that there is a fraud if you show them the video.
Also, the government party is slowly losing its rating and starts losing regional elections. Remote voting might be a cure for this undesired situation.
And probably any other government (for example Estonian) that implements such an opaque system has similar aims.
- codedokode 7y agoAlso the attack described by the research could actually be a good thing. Decrypting votes would allow to discover fraud, in case if it happens.
- nbabitskiy 7y agoExcuse me, please, are you living here? Do you really think there is a possibility the majority (or even 10%) of voters will vote digitally? It's so out of character of Russian voters, that I honestly suppose you're a Prigozhin's troll.
- maxander 7y agoI’ve never been to Russia and don’t know the Russian attitude towards tech or voting. But I’m confident that if the US had a system like this and made a reasonably usable phone app to be the front end, almost no one under the age of 60 would bother to wait in line for a physical voting booth ever again.
- mrlala 7y ago>would bother to wait in line for a physical voting booth ever again As someone living in a state with mail-in ballots, it still boggles my mind waiting in line for physical voting is a thing. Mail-in ballots seem to be the best of all worlds. It's easy. I have time to do the research for who I want to choose. It's all backed by USPS so it's pretty damn secure- as secure as everything else we trust in the mail.
- mycall 7y agoYou get the "I Voted" sticker to show off with.
- NotSammyHagar 7y agoYeah. Washington state is all mail-in ballots, once you try it, other ways just seem stupid.
- codedokode 7y agoAren't mail-in ballots too easy to falsify? You take a database of voters and send mail under their names.
- NotSammyHagar 7y agoThey have proven not to be. Here you sign them and add phone number or email. An advanced state could copy my signature but they verify I am a voter so double voting would be detected.