After All That, E-Voting Experts Suggest Voting Machines May Have Been Hacked For Trump

from the just...-no dept

In this topsy-turvy world where nothing makes any sense at all any more, Donald Trump spent months and months spinning stories about how the election was "rigged" and e-voting machines were going to be hacked in favor of Hillary Clinton. While we've spent nearly two decades pointing out problems with e-voting machines, and urged governments to do away with them, it still seemed unlikely that a hack would be sustainable on a large scale -- in part because our election system is such a mess and is handled differently from state to state. And, as Ed Snowden himself pointed out, hiding such a hack would be quite difficult. But with Trump refusing to say if he would concede, and talking up how the vote would be rigged, combined with false stories that made the rounds incorrectly claiming that George Soros owned a company that was making millions of e-voting machines, it seemed like a recipe for disaster if Trump lost and his supporters started insisting that the voting machines were hacked.

But, of course, everything is upside down this year. Trump won... and now suddenly some Clinton supporters are arguing that e-voting machines may have been hacked. Now, to be clear, I wouldn't even bring up this story at all under most circumstances. Even as I don't trust e-voting machines, stories of actual hacked elections tend to be the kind of thing that conspiracy theory kooks pass around, rather than anything substantiated in any real way. What's giving some people pause this time around, is that one of the people claiming that the votes in some states may have been hacked is J. Alex Halderman.

Halderman is legit. He's basically the guy who studies how hackable e-voting machines are. We've been writing about Halderman since he was just a Princeton student, and hacking DRM systems. But he's been hacking e-voting machines for almost as long. And he's really, really good at it. Remember the story of the e-voting machine that was reprogrammed to play Pac-Man? That was Alex Halderman.

That said... this story still seems unlikely. The NY Mag story on it is woefully lacking in detail:

The academics presented findings showing that in Wisconsin, Clinton received 7 percent fewer votes in counties that relied on electronic-voting machines compared with counties that used optical scanners and paper ballots. Based on this statistical analysis, Clinton may have been denied as many as 30,000 votes; she lost Wisconsin by 27,000. While it’s important to note the group has not found proof of hacking or manipulation, they are arguing to the campaign that the suspicious pattern merits an independent review — especially in light of the fact that the Obama White House has accused the Russian government of hacking the Democratic National Committee.

But... it's not clear this holds up under much scrutiny. Perhaps Halderman and voting rights expert John Bonifaz have more details on what they found, but as Nate Silver noted, a more rigorous statistical look at the data -- controlling for education and race -- seems to make the statistical anomaly disappear. A big claim of actual vote rigging via e-voting machines would need a tremendous amount of evidence to be believable, no matter who won. So far, it doesn't seem like there's enough proof here, even if someone as respected as Halderman is involved in making these claims. But the fact that he is involved at least makes it worthy of further scrutiny.

But... either way, can we please finally get people to realize that e-voting machines without a verifiable paper trail are a disaster and should have no place in any election system? We'd all be better off if there wasn't even a question of hacked voter machines.

Filed Under: alex halderman, donald trump, e-voting, election, hillary clinton

Election Day CyberFest: Hackers, Hacking, 'Journalism,' The FBI, And Jiveass Baloney

from the The-Year-to-End-All-Years dept

As this election's perfect argument for the dismantling of the two-party system has shuddered to a halt, the overriding issue appeared not to be a race run pretty much on no issues at all, but an unhealthy amount of paranoia.

Between the FBI's inadvertently bipartisan investigation (and reinvestigation) of Hillary Clinton's emails, the constant cry that the Russians are coming (two if by underwater cable), and Donald Trump's insistence that the election is rigged (until he won), voting (and voting machines) are the cyber-est thing of all this election season.

If no one's tampering with the machines, someone's tampering with the voters. Trump greeted early returns with a lawsuit over the supposed illegality of letting everyone lined up to vote actually vote before closing the booths. The bold new face of bounty-based "journalism" -- spearheaded by Pax Dickinson and questionable lawsuit enthusiast Chuck Johnson -- spent all day offering a $6720 bounty for evidence of voter fraud. At this point it remains uncollected, and the law of diminishing returns has sapped the energy from retweeters.

Add into the fun a set of researchers finding (SHOCKER!) voting machines to be terribly insecure. That in itself isn't new, but letting everyone in on how exactly to do it certainly is.

The problem relates to a 16MB Compact Flash card that each AVC Edge machine relies upon, which can be easily removed, modified and replaced for the purpose of modifying voter counts.

“After about four days and about $25 worth of hardware we had the machines spitting out results that cannot be technically refuted,” Ryan Smith, vice president of research at Cylance, tells Newsweek.

“It is an odd state of affairs when the technology in your phone is so strong that the FBI, with an $8.3 billion budget and months of work, cannot find a way into the machine protecting your text messages, yet the machines protecting our democracy can be foiled with just $25 in 32 hours.”

While we all can appreciate the offhand suggestion that it's the government that should be "nerding harder," plenty of people seemed upset that the researchers would drop this news into the already-overboiling election pot.

“This disclosure seems political in nature,” bug-bounty expert Katie Moussouris told The Verge. “Releasing this publicly, after DHS and states have been aware of these types of attacks for years, only serves to fuel the fires of doubting the election results.”

Hackers for Trump or whatever. This concern seems misplaced, given the inherent hackability of voting machines. It certainly grabs more eyeballs than it would in an off year, but there's nothing in here that suggests the release's timing was motivated by Trump's claims that voter fraud would be the only explanation for him not collecting more of the popular vote.

Finally, we get to the nadir of election paranoia. And, of course, it involves the FBI.

A tweet suggesting hacking of voting machines was in the works was sent out on October 21st. With impeccable timing, the FBI apparently showed up at the tweeter's door on election day.

This tweet just earned ya boy Jive a visit from the motherfucking FBI. Not even joking.

So, a photo of some USB drives and screencap of supposed code was enough to motivate the feds into investigating almost three weeks later. Things were cleared up when it became apparent a.) it was a joke and b.) the screencapped code wouldn't even work.

But if you're going to draw the heat, you may as well do in style. Choose your social media handle for maximum federal uncomfortableness, kids.

First question they asked me was "Are you the Twitter user, uh Jiveass *checked notes*...Baloney?

So, we have a new president-elect. At least that much is out of the way. There are only 45 shopping days till Christmas and an eon to go before this stupid year finally ends.

Filed Under: e-voting, elections, hacking, voter fraud, voting machines

Yet Another E-voting Machine Vulnerability Found

from the because-of-course dept

We've been talking about the ridiculousness of e-voting machines for well over a decade. If a machine doesn't include a paper trail for backup, it's suspect. That's been the case since e-voting machines have been on the market, and many of us have been pointing this out all along. And the big e-voting companies have a long history of not really caring, even as their machines are shown to be vulnerable in a variety of ways. So it come as little to no surprise to find out that security firm Cylance has announced that it's found yet another set of e-voting vulnerabilities in the Sequoia AVC Edge Mk1 voting machine. Sequoia especially has a long history of buggy, faulty machines.

Of course, with all the talk of "rigged" voting this year, the fact that some machines are hackable is very, very bad. Mainly because it just enables conspiracy theory talk to seem much more believable. It remains true (for somewhat ridiculous reasons) that while these vulnerabilities do exist, a widespread hack would be quite difficult. The real problem is at the margin, where low level vote changing could occur. As Ed Snowden rightly notes, the hacking may not be difficult, but using that to rig an election is much more difficult, and would almost certainly be caught. That said, this remains ridiculous. Even the appearance of potential vote hacking is a problem in actually getting the public to trust the results of an election. I can pretty much guarantee that no matter who wins tomorrow, someone will allege e-voting machine hacking, and point to this (or perhaps other) vulnerability disclosures in the days leading up to the election. And that's bad. For over a decade we've been sounding the alarm that it's ridiculous to use such electronic voting machines, and it would be a damn good idea to fix things. Would have been nice if someone listened.

Filed Under: e-voting, evoting, paper trail, vote rigging, vulnerability
Companies: sequoia

Argentina Not Only Wants To Bring In E-Voting, It Will Make It Illegal To Check The System For Electoral Fraud

from the this-is-fine dept

Earlier this year, we wrote about Australia's refusal to allow researchers to check e-voting software being used in that country. The situation in Argentina seems to be even worse. Access Now provides the background (original in Spanish):

The ruling party in Argentina is driving the adoption of an electronic voting system for national elections. Despite stern warnings from computer security experts about the dangers of the system, the ruling party is persisting with the project and plans to put it to a vote in Congress in the coming weeks.

Techdirt readers hardly need to be reminded about the deeply-flawed nature of e-voting systems, but there's a useful article on Medium (in Spanish) with plenty of links to hispanophone experts from widely-different backgrounds warning against the move.

Imposing an e-voting system may be foolish, but Argentina's plans manage to magnify that folly many times over. A blog post in Spanish by Javier Smaldone explains why:

The proposal provides for imprisonment (1 to 6 years) for conducting activities that are essential in any audit or independent review of the system.

Thus, it is intended to impose the use of computer system in the casting and counting of votes, and as if it were not already extremely difficult for any citizen to be sure how it works (and it is safe), anyone who tries to find out is punished with imprisonment.

It's one thing to bring in an e-voting system that most experts say is a bad idea in theory. But making it effectively illegal to point out flaws that exist in practice is really asking for trouble. Unless this proposed law is changed to allow independent scrutiny of the systems, Argentina will probably find this out the hard way.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

Filed Under: argentina, e-voting, fraud, security, security by obscurity

FBI Director: Our Electronic Voting System Is Such A Complete Mess, It Would Be Difficult To Hack

from the well,-then dept

There's been plenty of talking going around this election cycle about the terrible security problems with our current voting technology -- along with some conspiracy-theory level talk of foreign agents looking to "hack" the election. We haven't been very impressed with officials telling us all to calm down and it's difficult to see how FBI director James Comey did himself any favors by basically arguing that the voting system is secure... mainly because of what a complete and utter mess it is. The larger point he's making is somewhat valid, if clunky, in the fact that each state runs their own voting, so it's not like hackers can get into one central system and wreak havoc. The different systems definitely make it harder. But arguing that this is a sign of good security seems kind of ridiculous:

“The beauty of the American voting system is that it is dispersed among the 50 states, and it is clunky as heck,’’ said Mr. Comey. “A lot of people have found that challenging over the years, but the beauty of that is it’s not exactly a swift part of the internet of things, and so it is hard for an actor to reach our voting process.’’

Yeah, that's basically security through obscurity... at scale. Not exactly very reassuring, even if the underlying point may be true.

Wouldn't it be better if we just made sure the systems were actually secure (i.e., not computerized and connected to the internet) rather than just "clunky"?

Filed Under: e-voting, elections, fbi, hacking, james comey

DHS's New Election Cybersecurity Committee Has No Cybersecurity Experts

from the prepare-to-be-memoed-at,-hackers dept

The National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS) [yes, there's an association for everything] has just announced its selections to head up a DHS "working group" tackling "election infrastructure cybersecurity." Like any committee formed in response to a hot-button topic, the appointees are better known for their years of tenure in government positions than their technical acumen, as the ACLU's Chris Soghoian points out.

4 state gov officials, 0 tech experts, appointed to new DHS Election Infrastructure Cybersecurity Working Group.

About the only thing the appointees have going for them is that they fit the description: all four are state-level secretaries of state. Beyond that, there's very little to indicate they're qualified to take on cybersecurity issues.

The working group's president, Denise Merrill, is Connecticut's Secretary of State. At least her bio contains some initiatives loosely-related to the task at hand.

As Connecticut's chief elections official and business registrar, Merrill has focused on modernizing Connecticut's elections, business services and improving access to public records.

[...]

Secretary Merrill has worked to expand voter participation through Election Day and online voter registration. She has also improved Connecticut's democratic accountability and integrity with a series of rapid response processes to Election Day problems.

Indiana's Connie Lawson also appears focused on voter security, albeit in equally vague terms.

Connie Lawson is Indiana’s 61st Secretary of State. As Indiana’s Chief Elections Official, she is focused on ensuring the integrity and security for our state’s elections. Since taking office, Secretary Lawson has championed sweeping election reforms, and has led the effort to clean Indiana’s voter rolls.

[...]

Secretary Lawson is not just an advocate for election security. She is also working to modernize elections through vote centers. As a state Senator, Secretary Lawson authored legislation allowing any county in the state to move to the vote center model. As Secretary of State, she has worked to educate voters and elected officials on the cost saving benefits and convenience of the vote center model.

There's not much to be said about the other appointees -- Georgia's Brian Kemp and California's Alex Padilla -- in terms of cybersecurity. However, there's plenty to be said about safeguarding elections. Padilla has been sued twice over alleged election fraud. And Kemp's office mistakenly released the personal information of six million registered voters.

But there's one thing they can all agree on: there's nothing to worry about.

From Connie Lawson's home state:

Indiana's voter system is safe from hackers according to the Indiana Election Division.

“We are confident that the security features of our statewide voter registration system protect against hacks described in the FBI alert sent last week,” says Angie Nussmeyer, co-director of the Indiana Election Division.

Working group president Denise Merrill on the possibility of election-related hacking in her state:

She explained that Connecticut has perhaps the most decentralized voting and registration system in the country with 169 cities and towns that act as their own districts. Built into that system is an entirely paper based trove of voter cards, ballots, and backups.

“When you go into vote and you go to register on the list, it’s all still on paper so there is no simple database that’s containing all of the information," Merrill said.

From Alex Padilla's office:

A spokesman for California secretary of state said the agency, which oversees elections statewide, was aware of the cyber attack reports.

"We have no evidence of any breaches or hacks of our system,” agency spokesman Sam Mahood said.

The best statement of self-assurance comes from appointee Brian Kemp, who just a few days earlier was claiming vote-hacking fears were an Obama-led attempt to federalize state voting.

The federal government wants to help states keep hackers from manipulating the November election, amid growing fears that the U.S. political system is vulnerable.

But Georgia’s top election official is balking at the offers of assistance — and accusing the Obama administration of using exaggerated warnings of cyberthreats to intrude on states’ authority.

[...]

“It seems like now it’s just the D.C. media and the bureaucrats, because of the DNC getting hacked — they now think our whole system is on the verge of disaster because some Russian’s going to tap into the voting system,” Kemp, a Republican, told POLITICO in an interview. “And that’s just not — I mean, anything is possible, but it is not probable at all, the way our systems are set up.”

It appears Kemp is worried more about preserving the integrity of his opposition status than he is about protecting the integrity of the presidential election. One day prior to the NASS press release, Kemp was claiming to have turned the position down.

Kemp recently declined an offer by the Department of Homeland Security for cyber security assistance, raising concerns about the federal government’s intrusion.

Fortunately, this lack of technical prowess won't prevent the working group from achieving the DHS's goal, which appears to have little to do with actual cybersecurity.

"Secretaries of State are committed to working with our federal partners to increase awareness of federal government cybersecurity resources and services that are available to election officials," said NASS President Denise W. Merrill, Connecticut Secretary of the State. "We look forward to sharing state best practices and technical advice that will strengthen understanding and collaboration between state and federal agencies."

"Increasing awareness" is one of those goals that sounds lofty, but generally materializes as mass emails and the occasional mandatory Powerpoint presentation most attendees will doze through. Every person listed here is a figurehead appointee to a figurehead working group -- one likely formed in response to a similar, higher-level "increase awareness" mandate handed down by administration officials. The lack of tech experts isn't going to cause much harm because the point of this committee is to be a committee. No one expects any sort of cybersecurity breakthroughs to be generated by something that will do little more one more line to these politicians' bios.

Filed Under: cybersecurity, dhs, e-voting, election, secretaries of state
Companies: nass

FBI Says Foreign Hackers Got Into Election Computers

from the well,-that's-just-great dept

We've written probably hundreds of stories on just what a dumb idea electronic voting systems are, highlighting how poorly implemented they are, and how easily hacked. And, yet, despite lots of security experts sounding the alarm over and over again, you still get election officials ridiculously declaring that their own systems are somehow hack proof.

And now, along comes the FBI to alert people that it's discovered at least two state election computer systems have been hacked already, and both by foreign entities.

The FBI has uncovered evidence that foreign hackers penetrated two state election databases in recent weeks, prompting the bureau to warn election officials across the country to take new steps to enhance the security of their computer systems, according to federal and state law enforcement officials.

The report apparently noted that Arizona and Illinois were the two states whose systems were exploited -- with both attacks coming from the same IP addresses. From the report, it does not look as if the hacks were specifically about modifying vote totals, but rather accessing voter registration data -- but that's still a pretty big concern.

In response, the Department of Homeland Security has apparently reached out to state election officials offering "help" in better securing their election systems. Doesn't it seem a bit late for them to start securing their systems now? And, of course, it's not like DHS is somehow a great at stopping hackers either. It wasn't so long ago that a 16-year-old kid using the online handle "penis" was able to hack DHS's computer systems.

Maybe, just maybe, people in charge of elections in America should have considered some of this, I dunno, two decades ago when people first raised the issues about vulnerabilities in election systems.

Filed Under: cybersecurity, dhs, e-voting, fbi, foreign hackers, hackers, homeland security, security

Tempting Fate: Pittsburgh Election Officials Insist Their E-Voting Machines Can't Be Hacked

from the fire-everyone dept

Let's face facts: if you have an electronic voting machine it can be hacked. Anyone who claims any piece of technology or computer equipment is "unhackable" is a fool and should not be in a position to determine the security of such equipment. Electronic voting machines have a very long tradition of having absolutely horrible security and being easily hacked. It's why it's so important that people understand just how vulnerable these things are, not just because they can be hacked, but the poor security practices around them will lead many people to distrust the results of any election, even if all the votes were actually counted.

You know what doesn't help? Having election officials declare their e-voting machines unhackable. And yet that's exactly what officials in Pennsylvania's Allegheny County (think: Pittsburgh) have done.

Starting in the next few weeks and running past Election Day, the machines will undergo tests to ensure they are recording votes properly, that they have not been hacked and that they cannot be tampered with, said Mark Wolosik, longtime manager of the Allegheny County Elections Division. Each test is designed to check a potential breach in the system.

“The voting public can feel confident,” Wolosik said. “Everything is tested extensively before the election, after election and on Election Day.”

Election officials in Allegheny and Westmoreland counties said they are confident their electronic voting systems are immune from hackers or malware that could alter election results.

“In my experience, there is no way to compromise these election systems,” said Dave Ridilla, head of Westmoreland County's computer information department.

That doesn't make me feel more confident. It makes me question the competence of those officials. Any such hardware can be hacked. Saying it can't means that you're just not understanding the threats you face, and that's more problematic. There are things that people can do to minimize the risks, and hopefully that's what's happening here, but giving a flat out "there is no way" statement is ridiculous on its face and is almost screaming out to have that statement mocked when the equipment is actually hacked.

The machines being used do not appear to have open source software that people can examine, and they don't have a paper backup, so if votes are tampered with there's really no clear way to know for sure. That's especially problematic. Yes, people may have done a good job securing the machines, but saying they can't be hacked is not just wrong, but it calls into question the competence of the people securing the machines.

Filed Under: allegheny county, e-voting, electronic voting, pittsburgh, security

Bruce Schneier Sounds The Alarm: If You're Worried About Russians Hacking, Maybe Help Fix Voting Machine Security

from the wake-up-call dept

We've been writing about the lack of security (and accountability) in electronic voting machines almost since Techdirt began. Our very first post on the subject, way back in 2000, declared that e-voting is not safe. Of course, over the years, we've seen more and more examples of this, from the Diebold debacle to Sequoia's security disaster. Basically e-voting is a complete clusterfuck. The machines have long been easily hackable, and the companies behind them don't really seem to care much. They frequently don't do common security practices, such as allowing for outside testing of their machines (or, even better, open sourcing their code for security testing). Instead, it's a big "trust us" and any time security researchers have gotten their hands on these things, they've discovered that the trust is totally and completely misplaced. The machines are a disaster.

Along the way, this has created significant distrust among the electorate. Not an election goes by where we don't see someone accuse the election of having been "rigged" in some manner or another, with people pointing to the insecure voting machines as the mechanism. While nothing nefarious has been proven, just the fact that this has created massive levels of distrust in one of the basic practices necessary for democracy to work is concerning.

Now, combine this with the ongoing claims of Russia hacking the DNC's computer systems (which some experts are still disputing). Whether or not it's true, Bruce Schneier is noting that this should be a very loud wakeup call for fixing the security of voting machines:

But while computer security experts like me have sounded the alarm for many years, states have largely ignored the threat, and the machine manufacturers have thrown up enough obfuscating babble that election officials are largely mollified.

We no longer have time for that. We must ignore the machine manufacturers’ spurious claims of security, create tiger teams to test the machines’ and systems’ resistance to attack, drastically increase their cyber-defenses and take them offline if we can’t guarantee their security online.

Longer term, we need to return to election systems that are secure from manipulation. This means voting machines with voter-verified paper audit trails, and no Internet voting. I know it’s slower and less convenient to stick to the old-fashioned way, but the security risks are simply too great.

As he notes, "election security is now a national security issue," but it doesn't seem like anyone in the political realm has realized this yet. Hopefully, it doesn't take the discovery of a hacked election to make the point clear.

Filed Under: bruce schneier, e-voting, elections, electronic voting, hacking, security

Australian Electoral Commission Refuses To Allow Researchers To Check E-Voting Software

from the after-all,-it's-only-democracy-that's-at-stake dept

The fact that Techdirt has been writing about e-voting problems for sixteen years, and that the very first post on the topic had the headline "E-voting is Not Safe," gives an indication of what a troubled area this is. Despite the evidence that stringent controls are still needed to avoid the risk of electoral fraud, some people seem naively to assume that e-voting is now a mature and safe technology that can be deployed without further thought.

In Australia, for example, e-voting is being used for the elections to the country's Senate, but the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) has refused to release the relevant software, despite a Senate motion and a freedom of information request. Being able to examine the code is a fundamental requirement, since there is no way of knowing what "black box" e-voting systems are doing with the votes that are entered. A story by the Australian Associated Press (AAP) explains why AEC is resisting:

The Australian Electoral Commission referred AAP to a decision by the Administrative Appeals Tribunal [AAT] in December 2015.

In that decision, relating to a freedom of information request, the tribunal found the release of the source code for the software known as Easycount would have the potential to diminish its commercial value.

"The tribunal is satisfied that the Easycount source code is a trade secret and is exempt from disclosure," the AAT said.

Placing trade secrets above the public interest is a curious choice, to say the least. It seems particularly questionable given Australia's recent experience with e-voting software problems:

When the ACT Electoral Commission released its counting code, researchers at Australian National University found three bugs which were subsequently fixed before an election.

When the Victorian Electoral Commission made its electronic voting protocol available to researchers in 2010, University of Melbourne researchers identified a security weakness which was then rectified before the state election.

As Techdirt readers well know, bugs are commonplace, and there's no particular shame if some are found in a complex piece of software. But refusing to allow independent researchers to look for those bugs so that they can be fixed is inexcusable when the integrity of the democratic selection process is at stake.

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Filed Under: australia, e-voting, source code