DC Security Geeks Talk: Analysis of an Electronic Voting System

[R. A. Hettinga]

<http://www.cryptonomicon.net/modules.php?name=News&file=print&sid=463>

Cryptonomicon.Net - 

DC Security Geeks Talk on September 24th 
Date: Wednesday, September 24 @ 08:10:00 EDT 
Topic: Events / Special Interest Groups 


Talk: Analysis of an Electronic Voting System
Speaker: Tadayoshi Kohno (JHU and UCSD)
Date: Wed, Sept. 24 @ 7:30PM
Location: Virginia Tech Falls Church Campus 

Abstract:  Recent election problems have sparked great interest in managing the election process through the use of electronic voting systems. While computer scientists, for the most part, have been warning of the perils of such action, vendors have forged ahead with their products, claiming increased security and reliability. Many municipalities have adopted electronic systems, and the number of deployed systems is rising. For these new computerized voting systems, neither source code nor the results of any third-party certification analyses have been available for the general population to study, because vendors claim that secrecy is a necessary requirement to keep their systems secure. Recently, however, the source code purporting to be the software for a voting system from a major manufacturer appeared on the Internet. This manufacturer's systems were used in Georgia's state-wide elections in 2002, and the company just announced that the state of Maryland awarded them an!
 order valued at up to $55.6 million to deliver touch screen voting systems. 



This unique opportunity for independent scientific analysis of voting system source code demonstrates the fallacy of the closed-source argument for such a critical system. Our analysis shows that this voting system is far below even the most minimal security standards applicable in other contexts. We highlight several issues including unauthorized privilege escalation, incorrect use of cryptography, vulnerabilities to network threats, and poor software development processes. For example, common voters, without any insider privileges, can cast unlimited votes without being detected by any mechanisms within the voting terminal. Furthermore, we show that even the most serious of our outsider attacks could have been discovered without the source code. In the face of such attacks, the usual worries about insider threats are not the only concerns; outsiders can do the damage. That said, we demonstrate that the insider threat is also quite considerable. We conclude that, as a socie!
ty, we must carefully consider the risks inherent in electronic voting, as it places our very democracy at risk. 

This was joint work with Adam Stubblefield, Avi Rubin, and Dan Wallach. 

Bio: 

Tadayoshi (Yoshi) Kohno is a doctoral student at the University of California at San Diego Cryptography and Security Laboratory. He is also affiliated with the Johns Hopkins University Information Security Institute. Prior to entering graduate school, Yoshi worked as a cryptography and computer security consultant with Counterpane Systems (now Counterpane Internet Security) and with Cigital. 






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R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
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"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'