http://www.securityfocus.com/print/news/11336
Robert Lemos, SecurityFocus 2005-10-03
[bold emphasis added by wheresthepaper.org]
A federally funded group of voting system experts called on
the United States' Election Assistance Commission, which oversees the nation's
state-run elections, to revamp its recommended process for evaluating the
security of electronic voting devices.
In comments published on Friday, the ten researchers that
collectively make up A Center for Correct, Usable, Reliable, Auditable and
Transparent Elections (ACCURATE) stated that current voting systems are not
designed with security in mind and current testing procedures mistakenly focus
on voting functionality, not system security. The center, funded by the
National Science Foundation in August, released the comments on the last day of
a public comment period held by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission on its
Voluntary Voting System Guidelines.
"There used to be no gap between the process of
voting and people's understanding of voting," said Deirdre Mulligan, a
professor at the University of California at Berkeley's School of Law and a
member of the ACCURATE team. "Now, the advances of technology have taken a
process that was meaningful and transparent and understood by everyone, and
turned it into a black box that only a regulator can understand."
The comments are the last in a flood of nearly 1,000 submissions
received by the EAC regarding guidelines for the creation and use of voting
systems. While researchers and civil rights groups have voiced strong criticism
of electronic voting technology--and in particular the systems' security--the
national elections held in November 2004 saw only small problems that would not
have impacted the outcome of the election.
However, trust remains a significant issue. Voting machine
makers and the certification labs that have tested election systems have been
secretive about the technology. And, while older machines and the method for
counting votes tallied by the older technology were easily understood by the
average voter, electronic voting systems have become more impenetrable and have
not undergone significant and public testing, said Avi Rubin, a professor of
computer science at Johns Hopkins University and the director of ACCURATE.
"We are focused on raising the technology level a
little bit," Rubin said. "We don't even know, from a science
perspective, that you can have a paperless voting machine be secure
today."
The researchers at ACCURATE have recommended that the
certification and testing of voting systems be public and transparent and that
data be collected on election day so that systems may be better evaluated.
Transparency may become the major issue for voting machine
makers in the year before midterm elections in November 2006.
Many system vendors have taken exception with calls from
civil-right advocates and security researchers that they open their systems to
inspection. Initially, vendors argued that opening up their systems would hurt
their intellectual property. However, voting system makers now worry more that
the indiscriminate release of code could allow frivolous claims of
vulnerabilities in the technology.
"We do not believe that open, unrestricted publication
to the Internet is in the public interest and this is not based on intellectual
property issues," Neil McClure, vice president and strategic technology
officer for e-voting system maker Hart InterCivic said in a statement. "We
believe that open inspection must be controlled and managed to prevent reckless
claims from being made against our system for the protection of the public and
our customers."
However, other technologists argue that voting systems
should be based on open source software in order to be completely transparent.
The Open Voting Consortium has proposed such a system and is funding the
creation of a model voting system based on open-source software.
"Both from a democracy perspective and a security
perspective, I want the League of Women Voters or the ACLU or the Democratic
party, the Republican party or whoever to be able to hire a programmer and get
access to the code to audit it, and I want to be able to look at the conclusions
that the auditor comes to," said David Mertz, chief technology officer for
the Open Voting Consortium.
The Secretary of State for California has started to form a
task force to study whether requiring that all voting system code be
open-source software would increase the security and trust in elections. More
than a year ago, the California legislature requested that the Secretary should
"investigate and evaluate the use of open-source software in all voting
machines in California" by January 1, 2006.
State government have focused on open-source software and
open technical specifications in recent days as a way to promote transparency
of digital information. Massachusetts, for example, has set regulations that
require any electronic document format to adhere to three rules that prevent
companies from claiming intellectual property rights on documents created in
proprietary formats and ensure that documents can be read by a variety of
programs.
"The reason why open source is attractive is because it
is the ultimate in transparency," said ACCURATE's Mulligan, who is also
director of the Samuelson Law, Technology and Public Policy Clinic at UC
Berkeley. "We can't have a system where the technology is closed and we
have to trust the vendors."
However, open-source software is not a panacea, ACCURATE's
Rubin stressed. The code would have to be heavily audited and carefully
maintained. Moreover, if any proprietary software were included in the system,
then the total security of the system would suffer.
"If you don't have a malicious developer, then it
probably does add some security," Rubin said. "But if the worry is
that they could hide something in the code, then an attacker could hide in the
closed-source part of the system."
The Election Assistance Commission gave no date by which the
final draft of the guidelines would be released.
Copyright 2005, SecurityFocus
FAIR USE NOTICE
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of political, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.