ACCURATE annual report available

ACCURATE is A Center for Correct, Usable, Reliable, Auditable, and Transparent Elections. We are funded by the National Science Foundation, and I am the center director. Our 2007 annual report is now available here. It highlghts the Center’s major accomplishments and activities in 2007. This coming election year promises to be our most interesting and productive, as members of ACCURATE engage in all aspects of the election, as well as in researching technologies for improving future elections.

2008 Election Judge Training

I attended my Maryland election judge training session today. It was a 3 hours class for returning judges. There was really nothing new for me. I've already worked 4 elections using the Diebold Accuvote machines, and we will be using them again this year. I did, however, notice a change in the tone of the class.

Right up front, the instructor told us that the three most important factors for us to consider are "Security, Integrity, and Accuracy". These three things were stressed throughout the day. The instructor talked about the 20/20 segment where a hacker was able to change tallies on the machine (I think it was Harri Hursti), and told us of a new tamper tape that was placed on the corner of the machine where there is a screw for opening up the casing. As before, I had a good look at this tamper tape and determined that it would be extremely difficult to tell if the tape had been voided or not. I think these tamper tapes are emperor's clothes designed to make administrators feel good. One of the trainers referred to it as the "Lou Dobbs seal", in reference to Lou Dobbs' coverage of e-voting problems leading up to the 2006 election.

We spent more time training on the poll books than I had in previous elections. These are those machines that failed miserably in the 2006 primary. The instructor told us that the books would not work properly if they were turned on at the same time, so each poll book had to be turned on and enabled before the next one. I remember hearing this as one of the explanations of why so many stations failed in 2006. I hope that she is mistaken, and that the machines will still work even if powered up in arbitrary order. Otherwise, Maryland will have problems again in 2008, because I'm certain that not all judges will remember to follow these instructions. The poll books have a new feature this year that the instructor was very proud of. The chief judges can reverse a voter's check-in and reissue them a voter authority card. This feature is a bit scary, although I can see how it would be useful under certain circumstances. This is enabled via a 4 digit PIN that is supposed to be known only to the chief judges.

It struck me as ironic that we were required to fill out a survey about our experience as a judge, as well as an evaluation of our instructors. We were given the surveys on paper, with round ovals to fill in so that the survey and evaluation results could be optically scanned and tabulated. It struck me that the survey and evaluation of our election judge training was more auditable, secure, reliable and transparent than the machines that will be used in the actual election.

I hope that when I train for the 2010 election in Maryland, that we will be working on how to collect paper ballots, to avoid residual votes, and to work with precinct count scanners of paper ballots. If the state does not fund this change, then the measure to move to paper ballots that passed in the legislature last year and was signed by the governor will be thrown out.

Here are some pictures that I took at training today.

Ohio report is available

Ohio's secretary of state, Jennifer Brunner has commissioned a study that appears to be on the same order as California's top to bottom review of their voting systems. There are several reports available on the SoS web site. The most remarkable report is that of the academic team who analyzed the ES&S, Premier Elections Solutions, and Hart InterCivic voting systems. The academic report, produced by some of the leading computer security experts such a Matt Blaze, Harri Hursti, and Giovannie Vigna, and led by Patrick McDaniel of Penn State, is available here, on the SoS web site.

Quoting from the executive summary:

"All of the studied systems possess critical security failures that render their technical controls insufficient to guarantee a trustworthy election. While each system possessed unique limitations, they shared critical failures in design and implementation that lead to this conclusion:

• Insufficient Security - The systems uniformly failed to adequately address important threats against election data and processes. Central among these is a failure to adequately defend an election from insiders, to prevent virally infected software from compromising entire precincts and counties, and to ensure cast votes are appropriately protected and accurately counted.
  
• Improper Use or Implementation of Security Technology - A root cause of the failures present in the studied systems is the pervasive mis-application of security technology. Failure to follow standard and well-known practices for the use of cryptography, key and password management, and security hardware seriously undermine the protections provided. In several important cases, the misapplication of commonly accepted principles renders the security technology of no use whatsoever.
  
• Auditing - All of the systems exhibited a visible lack of trustworthy auditing capability. In all systems, the logs of election practices were commonly forgeable or erasable by the principals who they were intended to be monitoring. The impact of the lack of secure auditing is that it is difficult to know when an attack occurs, or to know how to isolate or recover from it when it is detected.
  
• Software Maintenance - The software maintenance practices of the studied systems are deeply flawed. This has led to fragile software in which exploitable crashes, lockups, and failures are com- mon in normal use. Such software instability is likely to increase over time, and may lead to highly insecure and unreliable elections."
  

and later in the executive summary:

"The review teams were able to subvert every voting system we were provided in ways that would often lead to undetectable manipulation of election results. We were able to develop this knowledge within a few weeks. However, most of the problems that we found could have been identified with only limited access to voting equipment. Thus, it is safe to assume that motivated attackers will quickly identify – or already have – these and many other issues in these systems. Any argument that suggests that the attacker will somehow be less capable or knowledgeable than the reviewer teams, or that they will not be able to reverse engineer the systems to expose security flaws is not grounded in fact."

The report is an incredible read. This group, in only a couple of months, managed to completely subvert these system and to expose them as woefully insecure and inadequate for the real world. Secretary Brunner, to her credit, has now recommended the elimination of DREs in polling places in her state. Now if only other states will follow her lead and that of Debra Bowen, SoS of California.

Does your home address begin with a '5'?

Tuesday was not a national election, and there was no election in Baltimore County, where I live, but there were local elections in many places across the country. This Washington Post story describes some problems in a local election in Maryland.

"Rockville's voting was complicated by a glitch. Thousands of residents who had not yet voted were mistakenly listed as having already cast absentee ballots because of a state database problem ... The state's [voter registration] list inadvertently marked as absentee the names of voters with a home address that begins with the number 5."

My home street address is actually 5, so I might have been affected by this, if we had had an election this week.

While this is an inexcusable occurrence, it is not really that surprising. The greater the complexity in a system, the more likely it is that unexpected glitches such as this will occur. I don't know if this was a software error, a programming error, a configuration error, human error, or something else. And the point is that it does not really matter. Complex software-based systems, especially ones developed the way voting machines today are built and tested, are likely to result in unforeseen problems. In the 2006 primary in Rockville, there were even worse problems with the electronic poll books. In 2008, the problem will probably be something new.

What worries me are not only the problems that we can observe, such as the ones last year and this week. I'm worried about the problems that might result in the wrong votes being totaled, without us ever knowing it. It is foolish to think that only really obvious errors will occur. Maryland's voting system, using only DREs statewide, is vulnerable to catastrophic error but also undetectable errors. And, although the state passed a measure to move to optical scanners in 2010, it now appears that the funding for this move may not be available.

A case of the wrong technology applied incorrectly

In this week's Economist magazine, an article describes how the Swiss general election that was held on October 21 was to use quantum cryptography to protect the transmission of votes from the polling stations to the central tabulation centers. Quoting from the article:

The authorities will use quantum cryptography—a way to transmit information that detects eavesdroppers and errors almost immediately—to ensure not only that votes are kept secret but also that they are all counted.

I first became aware of this project when a New Scientist reporter sent me a note about it and asked for my opinion. I assumed that it was a joke or that the reporter had heard wrong. After all, protecting electronic transmissions is the one problem I can think of in all of this that is not really hard. Here are some of the problems in electronic voting that are hard:

• Ensuring that the software on the voting machines is the correct software. The proposed solution of having a library of hash values of the correct binaries of voting machine software and checking the voting machines does not work. There is no way to perform the check of the hash of the code that is running in the machines. In fact, any attempt to check that hash value would provide an opportunity for an attacker to change the code then and there.
  
  
• Ensuring that the software on the voting machines is not malicious.Even if the "correct" code is running on the voting machine, there is no deterministic way to determine that the code was not designed with a back door in it that could affect the outcome of the election.
  
  
• Ensuring that no unknown bugs in the voting machines can affect the outcome.Even if the "correct" code is running on the voting machine and even if there is no intentional malicious code in the machine, there is no way to ensure that the code does not contain inadvertent bugs or unexpected failure modes that could disrupt an election or cause the wrong result to be computed.
  

Quantum cryptography is a novel and very interesting topic. There are potentially many applications that could benefit from this technology, and I have always been a big fan. But, quantum cryptography does not address the problems in electronic voting that are actually difficult to solve. Transmitting the votes from the polls to the central tabulation center can be done with traditional cryptography. Authentication functions can provide tamper resistance and encryption can provide secrecy, assuming that secrecy is actually desirable here. I believe it is not, as every aspect of the process should be transparent, and I see no reason to keep the precinct results secret. Just the opposite is true - it is important for observers to see princinct level results.

I applaud the Swiss for pursuing innovation, but in this case, they are using the wrong tool to solve the wrong problem in an inappropriate way.

Holt's H.R. 811 is finally coming up for a vote

Congressman Rush Holt's bill requiring a voter verified paper trail is scheduled to come up for a vote tomorrow. I've been traveling out of town, and I just returned home this evening (to an overflowing inbox about this issue). I was planning on writing up my thoughts about H.R. 811, but I just noticed that Ed Felten did a great job of writing his up on his blog. I pretty much agree with everything he said, so no need to repeat it here.

I support Holt's bill. I know that many activists, including several who have contacted me today, are opposed to this bill because it does not entirely ban DREs. However, at the moment, I believe that we need this bill to pass. It would outlaw the voting systems used in places like Maryland and Georgia and, I believe, 13 other states that have entirely paperless voting.

What's sorely lacking right now are paper trails and mandatory audits. Holt provides these. I do hold out hope that some day we will be able to utilize the added benefits of end to end cryptographic systems. But right now, the Holt bill is the best measure I can foresee to have a realistic chance of eliminating the paperless DREs that I may have to vote on next November 4th.

Avi

The Virus Did It

I attended Crypto in Santa Barbara this past week, and I was talking to a colleague of mine from another university. He had served as an expert witness in an interesting case involving a man who had been accused of having illegal pornographic images on his computer. His defense was that his computer had been infected with a malware virus and that "the virus did it." This may seem a little far fetched. However, my friend is a top security expert, and he had disassembled and reverse engineered the virus code, and he showed that indeed the virus was designed to download pornographic images from the Web.

The "virus did it" defense is likely to become more popular as increasingly nefarious online activity is uncovered. In a society where you are innocent until proven guilty, the possibility that a virus performed a malicious action from someone's computer, and that the person was not aware of this, may be enough to provide plausible deniability of almost anything.

Consider the implications of this for electronic voting machines. While the Princeton team showed how a malicious virus could copy itself to infect a precinct full of voting machines, and whereas the California top to bottom review team showed how even a single infected voting machine or memory card can compromise a back end tabulating system, in light of "the virus did it" phenomenon, the attacker's job in disrupting an election is even simpler. All an attacker has to do is leave evidence that casts suspicion that there may have been a virus. If an election audit reveals signs of a possible virus, the results are thrown into doubt, and a losing candidate has a legitimate claim that a virus may have tampered with the results.

The evidence of a possible virus can be created anytime prior to the audit, even after the election is complete. In a computerized system such as a paperless DRE, it is much easier to concoct false evidence that raises suspicion than it is in a paper ballot or end to end cryptographic system.

To visualize how scary this could be, let's take the example of Sarasota County, Florida in the 2006 election. Congressional District 13 was an extremely close race with the strange anomaly that an abnormally high number of undervotes were found in an important race. Several studies and audits were conducted, but the reason for the problem has never been conclusively determined. Now, imagine if an audit had turned up virus code on some of the voting machines. Even if no virus had ever executed or propagated, the mere existence of such code would have created chaos. Taking this idea a step further, imagine if such evidence were found in the Virginia Senate race in 2006. This extremely close race singlehandedly determined the party majority in the Senate.

When defending the use of DREs, vendors and some election officials argue that it would be very difficult to tamper with a voting machine in an undetectable way to change the outcome of the election. While I disagree with this statement, the truth is that it grossly overestimates the job of the attacker. All an attacker has to do is to create the impression that something went very wrong. The losing candidate will do the rest.

If in a future election we begin to suspect that "the virus did it," things are going to get very ugly.

Why nobody wants to buy Diebold Election Systems

In an Associated Press story today, Diebold confirms that they tried and failed to sell their voting technologies business. Given the recent reports in California and Florida, I imagine it will be even harder for them now. I think people, even within Diebold, are coming to the realization that DREs are the wrong model for voting systems. There are several reasons for this.

1. DREs are too complex. There are typically 50,000+ lines of code in a DRE, much of that involves user interface and audio capability, and providing the DRE interface and user experience is not worth the hit in complexity.
   
   
2. DREs serve as a bottleneck on election day. DREs are expensive, and so it is unlikely that precincts will have more than they need. Since voters typically spend several minutes voting, and I've observed as a poll worker that quite a few voters take more than 10 minutes, the potential for long lines is tremendous. Once a backlog of voters is created, it only gets worse, as the effect propagates much like the airline systems gets backed up in a positive feedback loop of delays once some flights are late.
   
   
3. DREs are non-transparent. The public justifiably does not trust them. They cannot be independently audited, despite the vendor's insincere claims to the contrary. Even DREs with a VVPAT cannot be properly audited because they just don't work as we would hope. Voters often do not check the paper. The paper rolls used by most vendors do not lend themselves to easy recounts, and the retrofitting of DREs with VVPAT has led to awkward and sometimes ill defined procedures, especially when a voter disputes the printout.
   
   
4. Finally, a much better model for voting systems exists, namely, paper ballots with optical scan precinct counting and ballot marking machines for disability access.
   

So, it is no surprise that Diebold can't sell their voting business. They'd be as likely to sell 8 track players instead of ipods.

Secretary Bowen's clever insight

On Monday, our NSF ACCURATE center held its second annual EVT conference. It was a smashing success with packed attendance and great papers. Today, we held our Principal Investigator (PI) meeting consisting of the PIs, graduate students and some of our advisors. To all of our amazement, Debra Bowen, the Secretary of State of California, who is on our advisory board, showed up for both days. This is particularly incredible given that last Friday she created a firestorm by decertifying most of the electronic voting machines in her state after the top to bottom review that she ordered showed tremendous flaws in the machines.

Secretary Bowen was an active participant in both our workshop and our PI meeting. Today on a panel of our advisors, she said something that really struck a chord with me. It was a simple comment, but it showed great insight into the computer software process as well as the election system certification process. Bowen's observation was that the certification process is not well suited to software. Most election officials defer to staffers or to academics such as us about technical issues, but Secretary Bowen sounded as much like a computer scientists as a state official this afternoon. She rattled off technical terms that she was completely comfortable with and made arguments based on a level of understanding of technology that I have never seen from a non-computer scientist. It is no wonder that she was able to put together the team led by David Wagner and Matt Bishop to study the machines and to appreciate their findings.

Back to Bowen's comment about software not being suitable for the way election equipment is certified. It is right on the mark. The current certification process may have been appropriate when a 900 lb lever voting machine was deployed. The machine could be tested every which way, and if it met the criteria, it could be certified because it was not likely to change. But software is different. The software lifecycle is dynamic. As an example, look at the way Apple distributes releases of the iPhone software. The first release was 1.0.0. Two minor version numbers. When the first serious flaw was discovered, they issued a patch and called it version 1.0.1. Apple knew that there would be many minor and some major releases because that is the nature of software. It's how the entire software industry operates.

So, you cannot certify an electronic voting machine the way you certify a lever machine. Once the voting machine goes through a lengthy and expensive certification process, any change to the software requires that it be certified all over again. What if a vulnerability is discovered a week before an election? What about a month before the election, or a week after it passes certification? Now the point is that we absolutely expect that vulnerabilities will be discovered all the time. That would be the case even if the vendors had a clue about security. Microsoft, which arguably has some of the best security specialists, processes and development techniques issues security patches all the time.

Software is designed to be upgraded, and patch management systems are the norm. A certification system that requires freezing a version in stone is doomed to failure because of the inherent nature of software. Since we cannot change the nature of software, the certification process for voting machines needs to be radically revamped. The dependence on software needs to be eliminated.

California source code study results

The source code team reports for the California Top to Bottom review of Diebold, Hart and Sequoia's voting systems are now online. These reports are comprehensive and detailed and should mark the end of the use of these voting machines in public elections. From the executive summaries:

Diebold
Our analysis shows that the technological controls in the Diebold software do not provide sufficient security to guarantee a trustworthy election. The software contains serious design flaws that have led directly to specific vulnerabilities that attackers could exploit to affect election outcomes.

Hart
Many of these attacks can be mounted in a manner that makes them extremely hard to detect and correct. We expect that many of them could be carried out in the field by a single individual, without extensive effort, and without long-term access to the equipment.

Sequoia
We found significant security weaknesses throughout the Sequoia system. The nature of these weaknesses raises serious questions as to whether the Sequoia software can be relied upon to protect the integrity of elections. Every software mechanism for transmitting election results and every software mechanism for updating software lacks reliable measures to detect or prevent tampering.

I am most familiar with the Diebold system, and one thing that stands out is how every time there is another study of the Diebold code, more security problems come to light. Here are a few issues that this report identified:

The audit log does not adequately detect malicious tampering.

Buffer overflows in unchecked string operations allow arbitrary code execution.

Integer overflows in the vote counters are unchecked.

Multiple buffer overflows in .ins file handling allow arbitrary code execution on startup.

Setting a jumper on the motherboard enables a bootloader menu that allows the user to extract
or tamper with the contents of the internal flash memory.

Keys used to secure smart cards and election data are not adequately protected.

The machine does not adequately protect the supervisor PIN. (This same problem was identified in this week's Florida report)

Votes can be swapped or neutralized by modifying the defined candidate voting coordinates
stored on the memory card.

OpenSSL is not initialized with adequate entropy

...

And the list goes on. Dozens of such vulnerabilities are identified; I just picked a few at random from the list. This is the code that Diebold produced after they claimed to have fixed the vulnerabilities we found in 2003 and that Ed Felten's group identified last year. The backend GEMS system has its own serious problems as well. It is clear that they are simply not qualified to build these kinds of machines.

As I read the three new reports, I could not help but marvel at the fact that so many places in the US are using these machines. When it comes to perscription medications, we perform extensive tests before drugs hit the market. When it comes to aviation, planes are held to standards and tested before people fly on them. But, it seems that the voting machines we are using are even more poorly designed and poorly implemented than I had realized.

The more these machines are studied, the worse they look.