Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

["Christian Stalberg" <cpsr_rtp AT internet-lab.com>]

Department Colloquium
Friday, October 31, 2003
4:00pm - 5:00pm, D106 LSRC Building

Title:
The Risks of Electronic Voting

Speaker:
Dan Wallach
Rice University

Abstract:
Recent election problems have sparked great interest in managing the
election process through the use of electronic voting systems. While
computer scientists, for the most part, have been warning of the perils
of such action, vendors have forged ahead with their products, claiming
increased security and reliability.  Many municipalities have adopted
electronic systems, and the number of deployed systems is rising.  For
these new computerized voting systems, neither source code nor the
results of any third-party certification analyses have been available
for the general population to study, because vendors claim that secrecy
is a necessary requirement to keep their systems secure. Recently,
however, the source code purporting to be the software for a voting
system from a major manufacturer appeared on the Internet. This
manufacturer's systems were used in Georgia's state-wide elections in
2002, and the company recently announced that the state of Maryland
awarded them an order for about $55 million to deliver touch-screen
voting systems.

This unique opportunity for independent scientific analysis of voting
system source code demonstrates the fallacy of the closed-source
argument for such a critical system. Our analysis shows that this voting

system is far below even the most minimal security standards applicable
in other contexts. We highlight several issues including unauthorized
privilege escalation, incorrect use of cryptography, vulnerabilities to
network threats, and poor software development processes. For example,
common voters, without any insider privileges, can cast unlimited votes
without being detected by any mechanisms within the voting terminal.
Furthermore, we show that even the most serious of our outsider attacks
could have been discovered without the source code. In the face of such
attacks, the usual worries about insider threats are not the only
concerns; outsiders can do the damage. That said, we demonstrate that
the insider threat is also quite considerable.  We conclude that, as a
society, we must carefully consider the risks inherent in electronic
voting, as it places our very democracy at risk.

Short bio:

Dan Wallach is Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Rice
University in Houston, Texas. His research involves computer security
and the issues of building secure and robust software systems for the
Internet.  Wallach's pioneering efforts led to the development and
standardization of the "stack inspection" security model, now used by
Sun, Microsoft, and many other systems. Wallach has also studied
security issues that occur in distributed and peer-to-peer systems,
focusing on techniques that can increase the robustness of these systems
against malicious nodes that do not necessarily follow protocols
correctly.

--
P.S.: In addition to his 4:00-5:00 talk on electronic voting, Dan will
be speaking from 2:30-3:30 in B101. That talk is titled

  Adventures in Copy Protection Research