The Florida Secretary of State has just released a report from the Security and Assurance in Information Technology Laboratory (SAIT) at Florida State University titled "Software Review and Security Analysis of the Diebold Voting Machine Software". This report is the output of a study that Florida commissioned to determine whether flaws reported in previous studies of voting systems, including my group's study, had been fixed yet. I was a reviewer of this report, and my graduate student, Ryan Gardner, played a key role in the study. The group was led by Alec Yasinsac who led the previous FSU study on voting machine security for Florida.
I am pleased to see that there are so many studies of voting systems being performed. In this past year, Connecticut, California, and now Florida have conducted thorough reviews, and all of them have highlighted serious problems with the voting systems. All this is happening as the House is considering federal legislation to improve the auditability of voting equipment.
Once again this new report shows serious, serious problems with Diebold, and that they clearly have not fixed some of the most egregious problems. One of the weaknesses that our report in 2003 pointed out was that Diebold used a single, fixed encryption key for all encryption in the system. Diebold has moved from using DES to AES. However, the key management is just as bad as before, and possibly worse. Here is an excerpt from the new report released today.
The system key is generated by computing an MD5 hash of the machine serial number. Its value is never changed after generation. Since the machine serial number is public, the system key is also essentially public. Anyone who knows this procedure can generate the system key and can access anything it protects, including the data encryption key and anything that it is used to encrypt.
This is arguably worse than having a fixed static key in all of the machines. Because with knowledge of the machine's serial number, anyone can calculate all of the secret keys. Whereas before, someone would have needed access to the source code or the binary in the machine.
Other attacks mentioned in the report include swapping two candidate vote counters and many other vote switching attacks. The supervisor PIN is protected with weak cryptography, and once again Diebold has shown that they do not have even a basic understanding of how to apply cryptographic mechanisms. Quoting once again:
The supervisor PIN is now stored on supervisor smart cards as a keyed hash of the actual PIN. Specifically, the PIN is concatenated with part of the data encryption key (the first 64 bits), and an MD5 sum is computed over the resulting string. The first 4 bytes of the MD5 are stored on the smart card. The most significant weakness of this approach again concerns the key management of the data encryption key as described in Section 3.7.1.1. The key can be compromised by an adversary with sufficient access to a voting terminal, and an adversary with it can find the PIN using a simple brute force computation. Again, the act of using the same key for more than one purpose is generally considered poor practice within the cryptographic community. Moreover, the input to the hash function is 64 bits of the 128-bit data encryption key. Using only 64 bits of the 128-bit AES key in this manner may allow an adversary to recover the data encryption key significantly faster than exhaustive search.
So, Diebold is doing some things better than they did before when they had absolutely no security, but they have yet to do them right. Anyone taking any of our cryptography classes at Johns Hopkins, for example, would do a better job applying cryptography. If you read the SAIT report, this theme repeats throughout.
In my opinion, in his letter to Diebold the Secretary of State of Florida, Kurt Browning downplays the severity of this report.
