7 ms·

Security analysis of the Dominion ImageCast X

49 points by emmelaich 3y ago

0xy 3y ago
[flagged]
- rudolph9 3y ago
  It prints the selected votes on a piece of paper that can be viewed by person who entered the vote and counted by hand (which was done in 2020) No system is 100% secure and while Georgia in particular seems to have some improvements they should be making, it’s important to be rational about implications the existence given vulnerabilities have on accuracy of an actual election.
  - drewmol 3y ago
    The section titled “Isn’t there a paper trail? Why is malware a risk?” explains a bit about this. The printout is read by QR code so it’s possible to list the correct selections but modify the QR code that gets read. It also addresses the percentage of voters who verify and how thoroughly (it’s not many). “If an attacker changes only the QR code, voters have no way to detect the change by looking at their ballots, since voters can’t read the QR code. The change might be detected in a manual recount or a risk-limiting audit (RLA) based on a review of the printed text, but that is unlikely given Georgia’s weak audit requirements, which have recently been further diluted.” Also it’s a poor decision by Georgia to not install security updates until after next election, but that’s the state’s position currently. I watched some of the Georgia congressional hearings regarding election security, audits, and safe guards after the 2020 election and it seems like their board of election was a total shit show. It seems like paper ballots and counting could prevent all of the problems or alleged problems they experienced in the last two major elections.
    - rudolph9 3y ago
      Again, there is definitely room for improvement but I don’t believe the data in the QR code encrypted, and it only takes one person to record them selves voting and a different vote getting printed on that piece of paper for this to become a big deal. It just seems very unlikely that even a small percentage of the votes getting changes would go completely unnoticed.
      - drewmol 3y ago
        I don’t think it would be legal to do that (record). EDIT: It’s illegal, GA 21-2-413. I’m not sure how the validation works, but I assume that there is an identifier in the QR code, and it likely doesn’t have plaintext candidate names so I’m not sure if you could even validate the QR code with available data, but it would most certainly be a crime. The scenario they exposed as possible is : voter receives a printout paper ballot with the vote selection printed correctly in text, but the included QR code has modified selection(s). That paper is then fed into the reader/scanner/tabulation machine. No further confirmation. The whole point of the printout is for voters to confirm their selections, the whole QR code step is a design flaw. Just print regular ballots with filled in circles that can go through a standard tabulation machine and still be read/checked by humans if you really need to add a (required) touchscreen interface to the process. “If an attacker changes only the QR code, voters have no way to detect the change by looking at their ballots, since voters can’t read the QR code. The change might be detected in a manual recount or a risk-limiting audit (RLA) based on a review of the printed text, but that is unlikely given Georgia’s weak audit requirements, which have recently been further diluted.” It seems very unlikely that lots of votes getting changed would get noticed to me. Maybe I have a misunderstanding of the process. An RLA would help, but Georgia has had difficulty in conducting audits due to incompetence of officials and people not following process rules, QR codes seem like unnecessary complexity.
        rudolph9 3y ago
        > No person shall use photographic or other electronic monitoring or recording devices, cameras, or cellular telephones while such person is in a polling place while voting is taking place; provided, however, that a poll manager, in his or her discretion, may allow the use of photographic devices in the polling place under such conditions and limitations as the election superintendent finds appropriate, and provided, further, that no photography shall be allowed of a ballot or the face of a voting machine or DRE unit or electronic ballot marker while an elector is voting such ballot or machine or DRE unit or using such electronic ballot marker, and no photography shall be allowed of an electors list, electronic electors list, or the use of an electors list or electronic electors list. This subsection shall not prohibit the use of photographic or other electronic monitoring or recording devices, cameras, or cellular telephones by poll officials for official purposes Yeah that’s pretty strict. It seems at least remotely plausible now. But still, I doubt the content of the QR code data is encrypted (probably cryptographically signed) especially given the vote is already written in plain text. And if votes of any significant percentage could make a difference were being switched someone would have a video (assuming the QR code data contains the chosen vote in plane text)
  - nurple 3y ago
    Were the votes that were counted on paper (or even the electronic ones) then made available online for voters to check that their vote was recorded as cast? Why does the IRS have the technology the positively identify a citizen remotely to allow them access to information that's arguably more sensitive than a vote and yet we can't use this tech for that purpose? Why is this the second time that a Dominion machine was found by a third party to fail under scrutiny by security experts and CISA _then_ comes in to investigate whether the exploits were, well, exploited amidst the well-documented "fortification"? Why doesn't Georgia want to update these vulnerable systems before the presidential election? Why aren't all elections given a third-party statistical forensic analysis? Why, if the machines _are_ flawed (as we found out in 2022), did Dominion win a slander case against Fox et al? Why in the ... is Dominon, a private company (and apparently a poor dev shop), the bastion of our democracy? I think the implications are pretty clear. “The very word 'secrecy' is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it.” -JFK
    - drewmol 3y ago
      Are you open to eliminating the secret ballot? I would be, I think the verifiably and integrity of election results would be greatly improved by making voting records public, I see no easy way to do the same while maintaining ballot secrecy. I’m open to the possibility there is a good transparent secret ballot system, but I haven’t heard of one that isn’t massively vulnerable to the possibility of fraudulent efforts by election administration officials.
      - nurple 3y ago
        I'm not against it, coercion/bribery always seemed to be a bit of an underwhelming justification for it; I just have a difficult time seeing it being done at scale (at least at the same scale as mutating the records can apparently be done), and like you said, it seems to excessively complicate the task. Even thinking of the possibilty of self-auditing, it leaves a large hole in the conceptual capability of validating the aggregate numbers. What I'd like to see is a human-to-human system, even if electronic (a la "venmo me"), where groups of people gather, discuss the issues, and cast their votes to eachother in a tree. The recievers meet and transfer their counts to the root of their branch, and so on to the tree's root. Every group knows their aggregate count, and even if you made the values of each node in the tree public it may be possible to keep the actual votes private outside of the individuals that make up each of the leafs.
- wyldfire 3y ago
  >™Electronic voting equipment is a scam, is dangerous and should absolutely not be trusted under any circumstances This kind of a claim without qualifications is not useful. There exist designs that could be secured. > After 2020, they immediately received updated narratives and began to claim that electronic voting was infallible This does not sound credible to me - legitimate news sources repeatedly asserted that no evidence of tampering had been found. This is bolstered by multiple court cases which had the opportunity to present evidence of tampering and none was shown. That said, if you can show legit news services who claimed it was "infallible" (or equivalent with less hyperbole), I'm curious enough to read it.
  - nurple 3y ago
    Doesn't it seem disjoint, given the level of technology we're told state actors can bring to bear, and given the apparently poor implementation of these system, to believe "legitimate news sources" (or those feeding them their talking points) would reasonably be expect to be able to even detect fraud if it did occur?
    - drewmol 3y ago
      It would seem that root access to the ICX BMD’s running android 5.1.1 would provide sufficient privileges to cover one tracks, I’d assume state level attackers would have the required knowledge to do so.
  - nurple 3y ago
    Mr. Cernovich seems to share the view that speaking of flaws in Dominion's systems had become an unspoken industry faux pas: https://twitter.com/Cernovich/status/1669491193833750528 https://twitter.com/Cernovich/status/1669491193833750528
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- mberning 3y ago
  [flagged]
- lyu07282 3y ago
  I agree, but this has become a republican talking point of election fraud conspiracy theories (which have proven in numerous neutral courts to be unsubstantiated). So now this issue has become poisoned and can't be discussed in any rational manner in the US. It's strange because I still remember how even back in 2006 the german CCC[1] demonstrated flaws[2] in the voting machines used in a german election, and successfully made the case in front of the german supreme court which declared their use illegal[3]. So this issue has a long history of opposition in the hacker community. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_Computer_Club https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_Computer_Club [2] https://www.ccc.de/updates/2006/wahlcomputer https://www.ccc.de/updates/2006/wahlcomputer [3] https://www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/SharedDocs/Entscheidungen/EN/2009/03/cs20090303_2bvc000307en.html https://www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/SharedDocs/Entscheid...
  - sam_goody 3y ago
    Well, yes - maybe we shouldn't be using electronic voting machines in the U.S? https://xkcd.com/2030/ https://xkcd.com/2030/
  - 0xy 3y ago
    Democrats still claim the 2016 election was illegitimate (including the candidate), as well as the 2000 election. Democrats invented election fraud conspiracies in 2000.
mvelbaum 3y ago
> Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has been aware of our findings for nearly two years, but—astonishingly—he recently announced that the state will not install Dominion’s security update until after the 2024 Presidential election, giving would-be adversaries another 18 months to develop and execute attacks that exploit the known-vulnerable machines. This is extremely disturbing. Why is this not a scandal?
- pphysch 3y ago
  The MITRE "nothingburger" too. It does smell like there is more going on than mere negligence.
  - drewmol 3y ago
    What’s MITRE?
    - 4rt 3y ago
      The security company paid by Dominion to certify that their machines were unhackable, as mentioned in the article.
      - drewmol 3y ago
        I did read the article, albeit poorly as I must have: skipped past that section by mistake -or- read it while distracted but either way MITRE seemed brand new to me when I read it in the comment.
    - meepmorp 3y ago
      A not-for-profit organization that does research and analysis of stuff, especially security and defense stuff.
    - kramerger 3y ago
      The guardians of the CVE database among other things.
- 3y ago
orangepurple 3y ago
Well now thanks to these guys the powers that be have a crystal clear development road map for locking in the next elections. Ever notice how nobody ever actually cares about patching security vulns in voting machines? It's always lip service and inconsequential paid studies forever and ever.
- mandmandam 3y ago
  I have noticed that. But I don't understand it. I've talked to many extremely smart people who have a blind spot the size of an electoral system on this issue. Much like funding healthcare or education, or drug policy, this is a solved problem, with known effective solutions. We just don't do it. It's bizarre. Like - these same very smart people I talk to will laugh at Carlin's jokes about how the system is rigged; big club that we're not in; have to be asleep to believe it, etc. But on this issue their brains turn off, like a switch. Goddam spooky is what it is.
- theptip 3y ago
  I think an important thing to remember is that _nobody_ wants to pay for security. Most companies do this too! Likewise most humans; we build on flood plains and then cry when our houses get flooded, instead of building flood abatements. Rather than hypothesizing a conspiracy, I think the most parsimonious explanation is just that humans are short-sighted and don’t want to spend resources on “unlikely to happen but bad if it does”. On this, perhaps we get what we deserve not what we need.
  - wahnfrieden 3y ago
    Workers often want to spend time on security that owners will not allow them
    - theptip 3y ago
      Agreed, but workers don’t pay for the things they build, their employer does.
woodruffw 3y ago
The full security analysis can be found here[1]. It covers supply chain attacks, hardware implants, and (IMO mostly interestingly) a broad lack of strong credentials and protections against voter identity spoofing. These vulnerabilities are concerning (as is GA's inexplicable decision to defer patching them), but as the article notes: no evidence has emerged that anyone has actually leveraged these weaknesses to compromise the results of elections in Georgia. [1]: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.gand.240678/gov.uscourts.gand.240678.1681.0.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.gand.24...
- asynchronous 3y ago
  Sure, no evidence has arisen that these have been used in the past: but I would like to note that this directly flies in the face of CISA’s past claims that “this past election was the most secure on record”. This research proves that was simply nonsense.
machina_ex_deus 3y ago
The biggest security vulnerability of voting machines are that a single person can count thousands of votes. And that is by design. Election security is a confusing business. It is, by design, the only thing you should not trust your government with, because your trust in the government comes from the election process. If you trust your government with the election, that's a circular trust problem and it's abused to the maximal extent possible. Which is why voting machines can't be secure, ever. Nothing the government does can truly convince the lay person it can trust a government provided voting machine, because in the security settings of election, the government is the adversary. It is actually the only time you should consider the government as an adversary and malicious - because that is when you verify and force it to be good. It matters less to win the election than to know that the government is accountable to the majority. I prefer the opposite political side to win in an accountable and trustworthy way (such as that I know their interest align with the majority of the population) than to have my side win and then answer to no one.
- greggsy 3y ago
  This is an extremely pessimistic view, but it’s evidently played out in the US, which (usually) espouses democratic principles, so it’s probably justified in some regard. In Australia, I believe that the officials and processes are highly trusted by the general public (or at least by those who participate in it). This (anecdotal) perception of trust has been earned through various means: a famous ad campaign in the 80’s featured John Farnham’s “You’re the voice” promoted an individual’s agency and participation, and a fairly hilarious Twitter account provided much needed outreach to a wider audience. There’s a somewhat impish yet popular pundit named Anthony Greene who has earned a reputation for delivering enthusiastic and entertaining analyses and observations during each election. The volunteers and temps who run and scrutinise elections are also just regular folk, and the commission exercise transparency and due diligence where necessary. They’re also independent of the government in so far as they do not implement policies like other departments: they merely activate the electoral procedures, once they have been triggered by an act of parliament. The thought of a sitting government or their agents affecting the outcome of an election is really only plausible in the context of branch stacking, or engineering the timing to suit their strategic interests. Murdoch media is viewed as a significant threat to democracy. The view that ‘all government elections are run by the government so they can’t be trusted’ is bordering on conspiracy theory logic. In many jurisdictions, they are executed by good people working for agencies that operate at arm’s length, with effective measures to prevent, deter and avoid misdeeds.
dools 3y ago
It turns out that there were actual cyber ninjas doing an audit all along.
T3RMINATED 3y ago
[dead]

49 points by emmelaich 3y ago

0xy 3y ago

[flagged]

rudolph9 3y ago
It prints the selected votes on a piece of paper that can be viewed by person who entered the vote and counted by hand (which was done in 2020) No system is 100% secure and while Georgia in particular seems to have some improvements they should be making, it’s important to be rational about implications the existence given vulnerabilities have on accuracy of an actual election.
- drewmol 3y ago
  The section titled “Isn’t there a paper trail? Why is malware a risk?” explains a bit about this. The printout is read by QR code so it’s possible to list the correct selections but modify the QR code that gets read. It also addresses the percentage of voters who verify and how thoroughly (it’s not many). “If an attacker changes only the QR code, voters have no way to detect the change by looking at their ballots, since voters can’t read the QR code. The change might be detected in a manual recount or a risk-limiting audit (RLA) based on a review of the printed text, but that is unlikely given Georgia’s weak audit requirements, which have recently been further diluted.” Also it’s a poor decision by Georgia to not install security updates until after next election, but that’s the state’s position currently. I watched some of the Georgia congressional hearings regarding election security, audits, and safe guards after the 2020 election and it seems like their board of election was a total shit show. It seems like paper ballots and counting could prevent all of the problems or alleged problems they experienced in the last two major elections.
  - rudolph9 3y ago
    Again, there is definitely room for improvement but I don’t believe the data in the QR code encrypted, and it only takes one person to record them selves voting and a different vote getting printed on that piece of paper for this to become a big deal. It just seems very unlikely that even a small percentage of the votes getting changes would go completely unnoticed.
    - drewmol 3y ago
      I don’t think it would be legal to do that (record). EDIT: It’s illegal, GA 21-2-413. I’m not sure how the validation works, but I assume that there is an identifier in the QR code, and it likely doesn’t have plaintext candidate names so I’m not sure if you could even validate the QR code with available data, but it would most certainly be a crime. The scenario they exposed as possible is : voter receives a printout paper ballot with the vote selection printed correctly in text, but the included QR code has modified selection(s). That paper is then fed into the reader/scanner/tabulation machine. No further confirmation. The whole point of the printout is for voters to confirm their selections, the whole QR code step is a design flaw. Just print regular ballots with filled in circles that can go through a standard tabulation machine and still be read/checked by humans if you really need to add a (required) touchscreen interface to the process. “If an attacker changes only the QR code, voters have no way to detect the change by looking at their ballots, since voters can’t read the QR code. The change might be detected in a manual recount or a risk-limiting audit (RLA) based on a review of the printed text, but that is unlikely given Georgia’s weak audit requirements, which have recently been further diluted.” It seems very unlikely that lots of votes getting changed would get noticed to me. Maybe I have a misunderstanding of the process. An RLA would help, but Georgia has had difficulty in conducting audits due to incompetence of officials and people not following process rules, QR codes seem like unnecessary complexity.
      - rudolph9 3y ago
        > No person shall use photographic or other electronic monitoring or recording devices, cameras, or cellular telephones while such person is in a polling place while voting is taking place; provided, however, that a poll manager, in his or her discretion, may allow the use of photographic devices in the polling place under such conditions and limitations as the election superintendent finds appropriate, and provided, further, that no photography shall be allowed of a ballot or the face of a voting machine or DRE unit or electronic ballot marker while an elector is voting such ballot or machine or DRE unit or using such electronic ballot marker, and no photography shall be allowed of an electors list, electronic electors list, or the use of an electors list or electronic electors list. This subsection shall not prohibit the use of photographic or other electronic monitoring or recording devices, cameras, or cellular telephones by poll officials for official purposes Yeah that’s pretty strict. It seems at least remotely plausible now. But still, I doubt the content of the QR code data is encrypted (probably cryptographically signed) especially given the vote is already written in plain text. And if votes of any significant percentage could make a difference were being switched someone would have a video (assuming the QR code data contains the chosen vote in plane text)
- nurple 3y ago
  Were the votes that were counted on paper (or even the electronic ones) then made available online for voters to check that their vote was recorded as cast? Why does the IRS have the technology the positively identify a citizen remotely to allow them access to information that's arguably more sensitive than a vote and yet we can't use this tech for that purpose? Why is this the second time that a Dominion machine was found by a third party to fail under scrutiny by security experts and CISA _then_ comes in to investigate whether the exploits were, well, exploited amidst the well-documented "fortification"? Why doesn't Georgia want to update these vulnerable systems before the presidential election? Why aren't all elections given a third-party statistical forensic analysis? Why, if the machines _are_ flawed (as we found out in 2022), did Dominion win a slander case against Fox et al? Why in the ... is Dominon, a private company (and apparently a poor dev shop), the bastion of our democracy? I think the implications are pretty clear. “The very word 'secrecy' is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it.” -JFK
  - drewmol 3y ago
    Are you open to eliminating the secret ballot? I would be, I think the verifiably and integrity of election results would be greatly improved by making voting records public, I see no easy way to do the same while maintaining ballot secrecy. I’m open to the possibility there is a good transparent secret ballot system, but I haven’t heard of one that isn’t massively vulnerable to the possibility of fraudulent efforts by election administration officials.
    - nurple 3y ago
      I'm not against it, coercion/bribery always seemed to be a bit of an underwhelming justification for it; I just have a difficult time seeing it being done at scale (at least at the same scale as mutating the records can apparently be done), and like you said, it seems to excessively complicate the task. Even thinking of the possibilty of self-auditing, it leaves a large hole in the conceptual capability of validating the aggregate numbers. What I'd like to see is a human-to-human system, even if electronic (a la "venmo me"), where groups of people gather, discuss the issues, and cast their votes to eachother in a tree. The recievers meet and transfer their counts to the root of their branch, and so on to the tree's root. Every group knows their aggregate count, and even if you made the values of each node in the tree public it may be possible to keep the actual votes private outside of the individuals that make up each of the leafs.
wyldfire 3y ago
>™Electronic voting equipment is a scam, is dangerous and should absolutely not be trusted under any circumstances This kind of a claim without qualifications is not useful. There exist designs that could be secured. > After 2020, they immediately received updated narratives and began to claim that electronic voting was infallible This does not sound credible to me - legitimate news sources repeatedly asserted that no evidence of tampering had been found. This is bolstered by multiple court cases which had the opportunity to present evidence of tampering and none was shown. That said, if you can show legit news services who claimed it was "infallible" (or equivalent with less hyperbole), I'm curious enough to read it.
- nurple 3y ago
  Doesn't it seem disjoint, given the level of technology we're told state actors can bring to bear, and given the apparently poor implementation of these system, to believe "legitimate news sources" (or those feeding them their talking points) would reasonably be expect to be able to even detect fraud if it did occur?
  - drewmol 3y ago
    It would seem that root access to the ICX BMD’s running android 5.1.1 would provide sufficient privileges to cover one tracks, I’d assume state level attackers would have the required knowledge to do so.
- nurple 3y ago
  Mr. Cernovich seems to share the view that speaking of flaws in Dominion's systems had become an unspoken industry faux pas: https://twitter.com/Cernovich/status/1669491193833750528 https://twitter.com/Cernovich/status/1669491193833750528
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
mberning 3y ago
[flagged]
lyu07282 3y ago
I agree, but this has become a republican talking point of election fraud conspiracy theories (which have proven in numerous neutral courts to be unsubstantiated). So now this issue has become poisoned and can't be discussed in any rational manner in the US. It's strange because I still remember how even back in 2006 the german CCC[1] demonstrated flaws[2] in the voting machines used in a german election, and successfully made the case in front of the german supreme court which declared their use illegal[3]. So this issue has a long history of opposition in the hacker community. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_Computer_Club https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_Computer_Club [2] https://www.ccc.de/updates/2006/wahlcomputer https://www.ccc.de/updates/2006/wahlcomputer [3] https://www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/SharedDocs/Entscheidungen/EN/2009/03/cs20090303_2bvc000307en.html https://www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/SharedDocs/Entscheid...
- sam_goody 3y ago
  Well, yes - maybe we shouldn't be using electronic voting machines in the U.S? https://xkcd.com/2030/ https://xkcd.com/2030/
- 0xy 3y ago
  Democrats still claim the 2016 election was illegitimate (including the candidate), as well as the 2000 election. Democrats invented election fraud conspiracies in 2000.

mvelbaum 3y ago

> Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has been aware of our findings for nearly two years, but—astonishingly—he recently announced that the state will not install Dominion’s security update until after the 2024 Presidential election, giving would-be adversaries another 18 months to develop and execute attacks that exploit the known-vulnerable machines. This is extremely disturbing. Why is this not a scandal?

pphysch 3y ago
The MITRE "nothingburger" too. It does smell like there is more going on than mere negligence.
- drewmol 3y ago
  What’s MITRE?
  - 4rt 3y ago
    The security company paid by Dominion to certify that their machines were unhackable, as mentioned in the article.
    - drewmol 3y ago
      I did read the article, albeit poorly as I must have: skipped past that section by mistake -or- read it while distracted but either way MITRE seemed brand new to me when I read it in the comment.
  - meepmorp 3y ago
    A not-for-profit organization that does research and analysis of stuff, especially security and defense stuff.
  - kramerger 3y ago
    The guardians of the CVE database among other things.
3y ago

orangepurple 3y ago

Well now thanks to these guys the powers that be have a crystal clear development road map for locking in the next elections. Ever notice how nobody ever actually cares about patching security vulns in voting machines? It's always lip service and inconsequential paid studies forever and ever.

mandmandam 3y ago
I have noticed that. But I don't understand it. I've talked to many extremely smart people who have a blind spot the size of an electoral system on this issue. Much like funding healthcare or education, or drug policy, this is a solved problem, with known effective solutions. We just don't do it. It's bizarre. Like - these same very smart people I talk to will laugh at Carlin's jokes about how the system is rigged; big club that we're not in; have to be asleep to believe it, etc. But on this issue their brains turn off, like a switch. Goddam spooky is what it is.
theptip 3y ago
I think an important thing to remember is that _nobody_ wants to pay for security. Most companies do this too! Likewise most humans; we build on flood plains and then cry when our houses get flooded, instead of building flood abatements. Rather than hypothesizing a conspiracy, I think the most parsimonious explanation is just that humans are short-sighted and don’t want to spend resources on “unlikely to happen but bad if it does”. On this, perhaps we get what we deserve not what we need.
- wahnfrieden 3y ago
  Workers often want to spend time on security that owners will not allow them
  - theptip 3y ago
    Agreed, but workers don’t pay for the things they build, their employer does.

woodruffw 3y ago

The full security analysis can be found here[1]. It covers supply chain attacks, hardware implants, and (IMO mostly interestingly) a broad lack of strong credentials and protections against voter identity spoofing. These vulnerabilities are concerning (as is GA's inexplicable decision to defer patching them), but as the article notes: no evidence has emerged that anyone has actually leveraged these weaknesses to compromise the results of elections in Georgia. [1]: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.gand.240678/gov.uscourts.gand.240678.1681.0.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.gand.24...

asynchronous 3y ago
Sure, no evidence has arisen that these have been used in the past: but I would like to note that this directly flies in the face of CISA’s past claims that “this past election was the most secure on record”. This research proves that was simply nonsense.

machina_ex_deus 3y ago

The biggest security vulnerability of voting machines are that a single person can count thousands of votes. And that is by design. Election security is a confusing business. It is, by design, the only thing you should not trust your government with, because your trust in the government comes from the election process. If you trust your government with the election, that's a circular trust problem and it's abused to the maximal extent possible. Which is why voting machines can't be secure, ever. Nothing the government does can truly convince the lay person it can trust a government provided voting machine, because in the security settings of election, the government is the adversary. It is actually the only time you should consider the government as an adversary and malicious - because that is when you verify and force it to be good. It matters less to win the election than to know that the government is accountable to the majority. I prefer the opposite political side to win in an accountable and trustworthy way (such as that I know their interest align with the majority of the population) than to have my side win and then answer to no one.

greggsy 3y ago
This is an extremely pessimistic view, but it’s evidently played out in the US, which (usually) espouses democratic principles, so it’s probably justified in some regard. In Australia, I believe that the officials and processes are highly trusted by the general public (or at least by those who participate in it). This (anecdotal) perception of trust has been earned through various means: a famous ad campaign in the 80’s featured John Farnham’s “You’re the voice” promoted an individual’s agency and participation, and a fairly hilarious Twitter account provided much needed outreach to a wider audience. There’s a somewhat impish yet popular pundit named Anthony Greene who has earned a reputation for delivering enthusiastic and entertaining analyses and observations during each election. The volunteers and temps who run and scrutinise elections are also just regular folk, and the commission exercise transparency and due diligence where necessary. They’re also independent of the government in so far as they do not implement policies like other departments: they merely activate the electoral procedures, once they have been triggered by an act of parliament. The thought of a sitting government or their agents affecting the outcome of an election is really only plausible in the context of branch stacking, or engineering the timing to suit their strategic interests. Murdoch media is viewed as a significant threat to democracy. The view that ‘all government elections are run by the government so they can’t be trusted’ is bordering on conspiracy theory logic. In many jurisdictions, they are executed by good people working for agencies that operate at arm’s length, with effective measures to prevent, deter and avoid misdeeds.

dools 3y ago

It turns out that there were actual cyber ninjas doing an audit all along.

T3RMINATED 3y ago

[dead]