Estonia Urged To Drop Internet Voting Over Security Fears 116
wiredmikey (1824622) writes "A team of global IT experts have urged Estonia to drop electronic voting from this month's European elections, saying they had identified major security risks. They also said the system's operational security is lax, transparency measures are insufficient. and the software design is vulnerable to cyber attacks. 'Estonia's Internet voting system blindly trusts the election servers and the voters' computers,' said U.S. computer scientist J. Alex Halderman, a co-author of the report released Tuesday. 'Either of these would be an attractive target for state-level attackers, such as Russia.'"
The source for the voting system is available for anyone to inspect. The Estonian National Electoral Committee released a statement dismissing the researchers claims: "At this point, we can give only preliminary answers to allegations published in the Guardian, as the researchers have not shared the full results of their work with us. The researchers met with officials from the electoral committee in October 2013, and could have contacted us at any point in the last 6 months to share the initial findings of their research. ... The researchers have not discovered any new attack vectors that had not already been accounted for in the design of our system as a whole. ... It is not feasible to effectively conduct the described attacks to alter the results of the voting. ... The electoral committee has numerous safeguards and failsafe mechanisms to detect attacks against the elections or manipulated results."
Ooh... (Score:4, Funny)
In practice, doesn't that end up being an ass-covering official equivalent to "We're pretty sure that Norton hasn't expired and we probably ran Windows Update pretty recently unless the junior admin was out that day" fairly frequently?
We aren't sure what happened (Score:3, Funny)
Even though it's not on the ballot, Estonia overwhelmingly voted to join Russia.
Jealous? (Score:4, Funny)
I think everyone else is just jealous because they have low voter turnout while Estonia's going to get 3000% in their next election.
The only downside is the overwhelming election of Moot to Prime Minister.