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Diebold Voting Machines Audited by California
Posted by
CowboyNeal
on Sat Aug 04, 2007 11:15 AM
from the who-didn't-see-this-coming dept.
from the who-didn't-see-this-coming dept.
Panaqqa writes "Diebold must be wondering what else can go wrong. Considering their arrogance in the past, their comeuppance is truly well deserved. The State of California's source code review [PDF] of the Diebold voting system has been released. Additional reports will be made available as the Secretary of State determines that they do not inadvertently disclose security-sensitive information. One wonders what it will take to convince voting machine manufacturers not to do things like hard coding passwords as '12345678.'"
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Politics: Diebold Rebrands What No One Wants 175 comments
Irvu writes "Diebold has apparently failed in their bid to sell their tainted elections systems unit. Unable to find a buyer the CEO of Diebold promised that the system will be run more 'openly and independently.' To prove that they are serious, they renamed it. Diebold Election Systems is now Premiere Election Solutions. They still sell GEMS, AccuVote OS and the ever-unpopular AccuVote-TSX which performed so disastrously in California's Top-to-Bottom Review under the same names. Apparently their rebranding effort only goes so far."
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Oblig... (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Duuuuuuude! (Score:4, Funny)
We have a psychic bond! I use that exact same password on my luggage and machines!
We're password buddies!
Parent
Re:Oblig... (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Oblig... (Score:5, Informative)
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Amazing.. truly amazing (Score:5, Insightful)
I often wondered how managers and CEO's that don't even have a clue get given companies to control. This level of obvious incompetence makes me wonder even more.
Maybe not so obvious (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Maybe not so obvious (Score:5, Interesting)
One of the major problems that I see is that the developers rely far too much on security by obscurity, no matter what the project covers, figuring that if the attacker can't see the code, then he can't see vulnerabilities, and they don't read enough about vulnerability research to understand how critically dangerous this is. They do things like requiring SSL for the front-end session, encrypting the back-end FTP transfer, and splitting off the management interface to an internal server, while leaving the access controls for the database identical for both systems, requiring only short passwords, allowing an inordinate number of password retries, using poor seeding techniques for session IDs, and leaving nearly-default configurations of the web server in place.
I tend not to place as much value in accusations of malice as I do in observations of incompetence. When presented with a result like this from any random company, I am far more likely to attribute it to the latter, unless presented with some fairly strong evidence to the contrary.
Parent
Re:Amazing.. truly amazing (Score:4, Insightful)
It's really pretty simple: Many companies are no longer run by the visionary people that started them, they are run by accountants and "risk managers."
Parent
Just use paper counting (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Sure it does. (Score:5, Informative)
10 of those bundles are totaled on a different marker sheet and bundled together. (100 ballots)
10 of those bundles are totaled on a different marker sheet and bundled together. (1,000 ballots)
10 of those bundles are totaled on a different marker sheet and bundled together (10,000 ballots)
And so on. The idea being that any individual bundle can be quickly verified or re-counted. And because it's all base 10, it is easy for MOST humans to visually verify the bundles themselves. The ones that can count to ten, that is.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
sommere wrote:
And you think that the electorate can make intelligent, informed decisions when asked to vote on hundreds of issues? Democracy doesn't scale well up to that level, that's why we're stuck with a Democratic-Republic [1]
Techie geeks have this amazing capability to focus on the wrong problem...
[1] Or we were, before the New
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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Interesting. In your system, would I have to hand all of my votes over to a single delegate, or could I sub-divide the issues among multiple delegates?
In any case, I think if you game it out, what ends up happening is that the delegates need to form voting blocks to get anything past the other delegates, and you end up with extreme levels of compromise going on to the point where your input into t
Re: (Score:2)
I think subdivision would work best, though at that point, you're basically voting on individual issues in the first place, except instead of personally voting on each issue, you're voting on representatives for each issue. It'd also introduce interesting difficulties, for instance, how do you ensure that when you assign your vote on abortion issues to a given representative, that that representative only spends your vote on abortion issues? There'
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Re:Just use paper counting (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Just use paper counting (Score:5, Insightful)
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Good day, Mr. Smith. Mr. Jones would like to see your voting receipt now. Naturally I am sure that you voted as agreed in our little business arrangement, because if you didn't, Mr. Jones will be very upset...
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If you put a voter's choice on the walk-away receipt, you commoditize the election completely, since the receipts become a call on a vote. You can print the choices
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Hanging chads is a bullshit argument - I've seen nobody argue that it isn't acceptable to use a voting machine that produces a printed voting card that's guaranteed to b
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The ONLY reason to fix it, is so it can be 'fixed' or so we can watch the outcome on the evening news, instead of two days later.
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Forging, destroying, or disposing of 100,000 paper ballots can be done but it is rather hard and time consuming.
Forging, destroying, or disposing of 100,000 electronic ballots can be done and with only a few keystrokes.
The thing is, most of the people nay saying the loss of paper ballots aren't Luddites but are
Not hand, mechanical paper counting (Score:4, Insightful)
Agreed.
Counting votes by hand in public view is almost as fast, has much fewer things that could go wrong with them, and is intrinsically open to public scrunity like no machine system can ever be. Plus, it's cheaper.
Wrong on faster and cheaper. As the recount in some Florida counties showed in the 2000 US presidential election.
Voting on paper is fine, but the paper should be mechanically counted. Hand counts should be a last resort when the machines are unable to read a vote or are malfunctioning.
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Let us assume that a person can enter one vote in 20 seconds on a voting machine. Let us assume that voting machines are busy 10 hours on voting day. Each voting machine will "count" 1800 votes in a day. So for $20, you can count more votes than the voting machine.
If each voting machine costs $400, it will take 20 elections to recoup your investment. And while there are multiple elections a year, y
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
That doesn't mean that electronic voting is the solution, of course.
Brett
Eeeeeeek (Score:5, Insightful)
They'd never sell a single one. No bank would accept an ATM that couldn't accurately track the thousand or so transactions that they see each day, or that anyone could gain control of by typing in a few keys followed by "12345678".
And yet somehow (through much campaign cash, etc.) they managed to convince politicians that all that stuff would be too hard and unnecessary in voting machines, despite the technology already being available from the same company. That it's not hard to count accurately millions, even billions, of dollars in transactions each day, but that it's too hard to simply increase by one the count in the proper register to greater than a few percent accuracy. And despite numerous security incidents, they are still fighting tooth and nail these simple things.
I'm not convinced electronic voting is necessary...but I'm wary of any politician that keeps trying to tell me there's no need to increase the security of such systems. Unless they say they're OK with their own banks using that kind of security, voting shouldn't use it either.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
There's also the substantial issue of the requirement to handle processing all voters on the same day within a certain number of hours. That requi
Re:Eeeeeeek (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course, DieBold shouldn't be allowed to touch this kind of thing, and someone will find a way to abuse it, but probably not any worse than we've got right now. I hope.
Parent
Secure Cellophane Bank Vaults (Score:4, Insightful)
This is like building a nylon tent to hold your valuables, then performing an audit to evaluate the strength of its zipper. The entire concept is idiotic from the start.
There's a simple solution to voting machine security: use paper ballots. The machines can help you fill them out, but the result should always be a paper ballot which is the authoritative record of your vote. Simple, easy, secure. Why isn't this being done? Who knows, but it's clear the concerns of the people in charge are something other than correct vote counts.
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Though to be fair, in the two counties I've ever lived in in two different states, they've both used paper ballots marked with indelible marker for the elections I've voted in
Some code howlers from TFA (Score:4, Informative)
void GlibPutPixel(UINT xx, UINT yy, Pixel_t Color)
{
if(FrameBuffer != FALSE || (xx < USER_X) || (yy < USER_Y))
{
FrameBuffer[FB_OFFSET(xx,yy)] = Color;
}
}
TCHAR name;
_stprintf(&name, _T("\\Storage Card\\%s"), findData.cFileName);
Install(&name, hInstance);
First uses logical OR instead of logical AND to check boundaries, second writes a string where there is only storage for one character!
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"Plausible Deniability", Anyone? (Score:5, Insightful)
I can almost imagine that being a deliberate ploy. "
I'm sorry your honour, but one of our programmers (no longer under our employ) hard coded a weak password in complete disregard of coding standards. Regretably, the weakness of the password has enabled certain parties to guess what it is, and thereby subvert the electoral process. But it's not our fault."
Hanlon's Razor be dammned. In cases like this we should start assuming malice unless they can prove stupidity beyond any reasonable doubt.
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1, 2, 3, 4, 5... (Score:2, Funny)
California decertified all machines last night (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Or if Paris Hilton crashed into a voting machine while DUI.
Or if...yea...
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
That's misleading. They decertified them, then recertified them with some additional security requirements.
See here: Elections chief gives OK to vote machines [sfgate.com]
Look how others do it? (Score:2)
What it would take is for them to be punished in the marketplace, as in not buying the damned things.
I think we ought to go to other countries with a reputation of a good voting process and see how they do it, and with which, if any, machines they use. Because we obviously forgot how, and in some parts of the country they never had a fair voting process. No need to roll our own
Their conclusions are (Score:2)
"Our study of the Diebold source code found that the system does not meet the requirements for a security-critical system. It is built upon an inherently fragile design and suffers from implementation flaws that can expose the entire voting system to attacks. These vulnerabilities, if exploited, could jeopardize voter privacy and the integrity of elections. An attack could plausibly be accomplished by a single skilled individual with temporary access to a single voting mach
My favourite issue (Score:3, Informative)
Issue 5.2.24: AV-TSX startup code contains blatant errors.
287 TCHAR name;
288 _stprintf(&name, _T(''\\Storage Card\\%s''), findData.cFileName);
289 Install(&name, hInstance);
Here, name is not a character array but a single character in memory. The stprintf function
expects its first parameter to be a character array, so the programmer had to use the&operator
to get the address of name, rather than its value. The result is an obvious buffer overflow. A
string that includes the filename, which could be under an attacker's control, gets copied over
whatever data resides in the memory region following name.
That this code works at all seems purely accidental. Memory corruption occurs even when
legitimate
containing particular characters might be able to crash the program or, possibly, execute
malicious code.
This bug sheds light on the vendor's software engineering practices, because it is a very
unusual error for an experienced C++ programmer to make. Characters and character arrays
are very different constructs in C++. Students using the language for the first time might
confuse the two, but experienced programmers who understand basic concepts like pointers
would be unlikely to confuse them. The probability that an experienced C++ programmer
would make such a mistake or overlook it during even a cursory review of the code is
exceptionally low. This suggests to us that after this code was written it was not reviewed
by any other engineers at Diebold.
That's gold Jerry! Gold!
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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Look it up. Ballot readers are compromised as easily as the original machines.
An ideal arrangement is to have a printed ballot as the official ballot, and a supervised hand-counted count which is the OFFICIAL count. Then, the original voting machines can also perform an electronic tally themselves, and this electronic tally can serve as a check for the hand count. If the two differ significantly, somethin