Entries Tagged "security analysis"

Page 1 of 1

NSA on Securing VPNs

The NSA’s Cybersecurity Directorate — that’s the part that’s supposed to work on defense — has released two documents (a full and an abridged version) on securing virtual private networks. Some of it is basic, but it contains good information.

Maintaining a secure VPN tunnel can be complex and requires regular maintenance. To maintain a secure VPN, network administrators should perform the following tasks on a regular basis:

  • Reduce the VPN gateway attack surface
  • Verify that cryptographic algorithms are Committee on National Security Systems Policy (CNSSP) 15-compliant
  • Avoid using default VPN settings
  • Remove unused or non-compliant cryptography suites
  • Apply vendor-provided updates (i.e. patches) for VPN gateways and clients

Posted on July 15, 2020 at 9:29 AM • View Comments

Security Analysis of the Democracy Live Online Voting System

New research: “Security Analysis of the Democracy Live Online Voting System“:

Abstract: Democracy Live’s OmniBallot platform is a web-based system for blank ballot delivery, ballot marking, and (optionally) online voting. Three states — Delaware, West Virginia, and New Jersey — recently announced that they will allow certain voters to cast votes online using OmniBallot, but, despite the well established risks of Internet voting, the system has never been the subject of a public, independent security review.

We reverse engineered the client-side portion of OmniBallot, as used in Delaware, in order to detail the system’s operation and analyze its security.We find that OmniBallot uses a simplistic approach to Internet voting that is vulnerable to vote manipulation by malware on the voter’s device and by insiders or other attackers who can compromise Democracy Live, Amazon,Google, or Cloudflare. In addition, Democracy Live, which appears to have no privacy policy, receives sensitive personally identifiable information­ — including the voter’s identity, ballot selections, and browser fingerprint­ — that could be used to target political ads or disinformation campaigns.Even when OmniBallot is used to mark ballots that will be printed and returned in the mail, the software sends the voter’s identity and ballot choices to Democracy Live, an unnecessary security risk that jeopardizes the secret ballot. We recommend changes to make the platform safer for ballot delivery and marking. However, we conclude that using OmniBallot for electronic ballot return represents a severe risk to election security and could allow attackers to alter election results without detection.

News story.

EDITED TO ADD: This post has been translated into Portuguese.

Posted on June 9, 2020 at 6:26 AM • View Comments

Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.