________________________________________ From: Rod Van Meter [rdv@sfc.wide.ad.jp] Sent: Thursday, December 06, 2007 1:45 AM To: David Farber Subject: electronic voting in Japan Dave, for IP, if you wish... There is an article in today's Yomiuri Shimbun (Japanese edition only -- page one, actually) about the possibility of electronic voting in national elections next year. http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/politics/news/20071206it01.htm (try feeding it to your favorite online translator for a Dadaesque interpretation) Electronic voting machines have already been tried here, in a few prefectural (state/province) elections. Apparently, all of the major parties are in agreement on this. I just got a glance at the print version, which had a picture; they will be touch panel machines that offer you a simple choice, then I believe print out a sheet for confirmation and actual submission. I'm fuzzy on these details, don't quote me there; the online article doesn't really say. The article asserts that vote tabulation time can be dramatically reduced, which seems unlikely, since the Japanese system is already amazing efficient: results appear in as little as twenty minutes after elections, despite being hand-counted. There is a separate ballot for each office, so they can be quickly sorted into boxes based on vote, then the box is counted. (Don't ask me how they verify validity.) I asked some students about this, and one pointed me at a paper: The Security Analysis of e-voting systems in Japan Hiroki Hisamitsu, Keiji Takeda Carnegie Mellon CyLab Japan 1-3-3 Higashikawasaki-cho, Chuo-ku, Kobe city, Hyogo prefecture, Japan 650-0044 hhisamit@andrew.cmu.edu tkeiji@cmu.edu Abstract To assess trustworthiness of e-voting practices in Japan, security of e-voting systems and their operational procedures are examined. Through these analyses we concluded that current e-voting security is heavily depending on protection by operational process rather than security feature of the system and it is confirmed that the systems provide only limited security feature though there is large room for technical improvement. Typical security issues are lack of protection mechanism of programs and data on counting machines and on tabulate machines. This vulnerability enables malicious poll worker or manufacturer to insert malicious code to generate arbitrary election result.
From the recent IPSJ Computer Security Symposium. The abstract is in both Japanese and English, but the paper is only in Japanese, unfortunately.
--Rod P.S. I ran the Yomiuri article through Google's translator. It has gotten MUCH better recently (six months ago it was laughable and unintellible, now it looks like poorly-written English), and offers the user the original by hovering the mouse over a sentence, and even allows the user to suggest a better translation. Nice! ------------------------------------------- Archives: http://v2.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now RSS Feed: http://v2.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/ Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE