Schneier on Security

myliit • June 20, 2020 8:32 AM

A long read that includes “Democracy Live”, poor security, and potential voter fraud.

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/why-you-cant-just-vote-on-your-phone-during-the-pandemic

“Why You Can’t Just Vote on Your Phone During the Pandemic

This month, long waits and pandemic fears have hampered voting sites around the country, including this one in Indianapolis. But online voting is still far from safe.

When Alex Howard, a resident of Washington, D.C., failed to receive an absentee ballot for the city’s June 2nd primary, he assumed that he would have to vote in person. Then, by chance, on the day of the election, he saw a Twitter post alerting voters of the option to vote remotely over the Internet. Howard, a digital-governance expert at Demand Progress, an advocacy group for good governance, decided to give it a try. “I’m a poker and a prodder and a professional evaluator of government I.T. programs,” he told me. “I like to see how things work.” He was directed to a Web site typically reserved for members of the military, which sent him to a site where he confirmed his date of birth and address. He then logged on to another site to vote. A few minutes later, he e-mailed his completed ballot to the Board of Elections. “There were people who stood in line for hours and hours to vote, and here I was, voting at home on my laptop,” he said. “It was really good for my family from a health standpoint, but whether it’s a good idea at scale—I don’t think so.” He is still waiting to hear if his ballot was received.

[…]

For computer scientists who study election software, online-voting programs are a security nightmare. They invite bad actors to slip in undetected and compromise election systems, leaving those systems susceptible to denial-of-service attacks, ransomware, malware, and vote flipping. In 2014, a team of computer scientists at a company in Portland, Oregon, that builds secure systems for the National Security Agency and the Department of Defense showed, in real time [ https://galois.com/blog/2014/11/hacking-internet-voting-via-ballot-tampering/ ], how easy it is to change the contents of a voter’s PDF file as it travels over the Internet. They sent a video of their attack to secretaries of state and other election officials, and posted an explanatory video on YouTube, showing all the weak links in the online transmission of ballots. “This is not just a theoretical danger,” one of the researchers, Joe Kiniry, said at the time. “Votes are silently changed after they leave your computer and before they reach election officials. What’s more, there’s no trace of foul play.” Last month, in anticipation of renewed calls for online voting during the pandemic, the Department of Homeland Security sent a federal risk assessment to state election officials around the country, warning them of the insecurities of Internet voting and concluding that the technology was not advanced enough to be widely disseminated.

[…]

Five days after the D.C. election, two computer scientists, J. Alex Halderman, at the University of Michigan, and Michael Specter, at M.I.T., released the results of an independent forensic analysis of OmniBallot. Their report can be summed up in three words: it’s not safe. In their estimation, the system is vulnerable to malware and manipulation. Halderman and Specter were especially concerned that, even when a voter returns an OmniBallot by traditional mail, the contents of that ballot, along with the identity of the voter, are recorded by the software. If that information were to be leaked or sold, they wrote, it could be used for targeted political ads, disinformation, or coercion. (When the researchers pointed out that the Democracy Live Web site did not have a policy spelling out the company’s privacy protocols, Finney added one.) In his response to the report, Finney noted that Halderman and Specter’s complaints “relating to the transmission of ballots and the possibility of a compromised device . . . is a universal critique of Web sites in general.”

But a voting Web site, which conveys the most basic expression of citizenship, is also a repository for the democratic process. In January, Halderman co-authored a piece for Slate titled “Internet Voting Is Happening Now and It Could Destroy Our Elections,” which took aim at a blockchain-based electronic-voting system that was in use at the time in West Virginia, called Voatz. Specter and two other M.I.T. researchers were the authors of a technical takedown of Voatz, which resulted in its actual takedown by the state. Among other issues, they found that hackers could easily change votes. West Virginia switched to OmniBallot.

West Virginia’s Voatz pilot and the King County Conservation District OmniBallot election were underwritten by the venture capitalist Bradley Tusk, through his charity, Tusk Philanthropies. …”