March 29, 2024

Update: Indian E-Voting Researcher Remains in Police Custody

Update: 8/28 Indian E-Voting Researcher Freed After Seven Days in Police Custody

In case you’re just tuning in, e-voting researcher Hari Prasad, with whom I coauthored a paper exposing serious flaws in India’s electronic voting machines (EVMs), was arrested Saturday morning at his home in Hyderabad. The arresting officers told him they were acting under “pressure [from] the top,” and demanded that he disclose the identity of the anonymous source who provided the voting machine that we studied. Since then, Hari has been held in custody by the Mumbai police and repeatedly questioned.

Recent Developments

There have several developments in Hari’s case since my last post.

On Sunday, about 28 hours after his arrest, Hari appeared before a magistrate in Mumbai and was formally charged for the first time. The officers who arrested him had not stated a specific charge, but they had told him he would be left alone if he would reveal the identity of the source who provided us the machine . Hari has not named the source, and the authorities are now alleging that he took the machine from the government’s warehouse himself.

Specifically, he was charged under Section 454 of the Indian Penal Code (“lurking house-trespass or house-breaking in order to commit [an] offence punishable with imprisonment”), Section 457 (“lurking house trespass or house-breaking by night in order to commit an offence punishable with imprisonment”) and Section 380 (“theft in [a] dwelling house”).

These charges are without merit. Hari has never denied having been in possession of a machine—we even held it up for a photograph to accompany our paper—but the police have offered no evidence whatsoever that Hari ever trespassed in a government warehouse, much less stole a voting machine or anything else from one.

As I have previously stated, Hari obtained access to the machine from a source who approached him earlier this year. We have every reason to believe that the source had lawful access to the machine and made it available for scientific study as a matter of conscience, out of concern over potential security problems.

At Sunday’s hearing, Hari was remanded in police custody until today, when he appeared again before a magistrate and requested bail on medical grounds. (He is reported to be suffering from breathing problems.) The court refused to entertain the bail request and instead granted a police request that Hari remain in custody. The next hearing is scheduled for Saturday, at which time Hari can again seek bail.

One positive development is that Hari’s legal team now includes Mahesh Jethmalani and his father, Ram Jethmalani. I am told they are among the most sought after defense lawyers in India.

Keeping Sight of the Facts

Hari’s arrest has provoked explosive debate in India, not only about the arrest’s apparent political motives, but also about much broader questions our study raised over the security and transparency of India’s voting system. In the midst of this emotionally charged debate, I think it would be helpful to reiterate what our study does and does not reveal.

What the study I coauthored with Hari Prasad shows is essentially two things:

First, far from being “tamperproof,” India’s EVMs are vulnerable to most of the same security problems as the paper ballots they replaced—including an electronic form of booth capturing. Any time during or after the election, dishonest election insiders or other criminals with physical access to the machines can alter the votes stored inside.

Second, unlike the old paper ballot boxes, the EVMs can be tampered with long before elections take place to cause fraudulent results in the future. In other words, a dishonest insider or other criminal could manipulate an EVM today and have it steal votes months or years from now. You can’t do that with a ballot box.

What our study doesn’t show is that any election has ever been stolen by tampering with EVMs. Today’s EVMs are susceptible to tampering, and such tampering has the potential to change results in national elections, but our study does not even attempt to show that any past election result is invalid. Nobody can reasonably claim, based solely on the results we’ve presented, that an election now settled should be overturned.

Now that we know that EVMs have these vulnerabilities, it’s time for the Election Commission of India to stop pretending that the machines used today are perfect, and start working with India’s academic and technical communities to create a voting system that is worthy of voters’ trust.

Electronic Voting Researcher Arrested Over Anonymous Source

Updates: 8/28 Alex Halderman: Indian E-Voting Researcher Freed After Seven Days in Police Custody
8/26 Alex Halderman: Indian E-Voting Researcher Remains in Police Custody
8/24 Ed Felten: It’s Time for India to Face its E-Voting Problem
8/22 Rop Gonggrijp: Hari is in jail 🙁

About four months ago, Ed Felten blogged about a research paper in which Hari Prasad, Rop Gonggrijp, and I detailed serious security flaws in India’s electronic voting machines. Indian election authorities have repeatedly claimed that the machines are “tamperproof,” but we demonstrated important vulnerabilities by studying a machine provided by an anonymous source.

The story took a disturbing turn a little over 24 hours ago, when my coauthor Hari Prasad was arrested by Indian authorities demanding to know the identity of that source.

At 5:30 Saturday morning, about ten police officers arrived at Hari’s home in Hyderabad. They questioned him about where he got the machine we studied, and at around 8 a.m. they placed him under arrest and proceeded to drive him to Mumbai, a 14 hour journey.

The police did not state a specific charge at the time of the arrest, but it appears to be a politically motivated attempt to uncover our anonymous source. The arresting officers told Hari that they were under “pressure [from] the top,” and that he would be left alone if he would reveal the source’s identity.

Hari was allowed to use his cell phone for a time, and I spoke with him as he was being driven by the police to Mumbai:

The Backstory

India uses paperless electronic voting machines nationwide, and the Election Commission of India, the country’s highest election authority, has often stated that the machines are “perfect” and “fully tamper-proof.” Despite widespread reports of election irregularities and suspicions of electronic fraud, the Election Commission has never permitted security researchers to complete an independent evaluation nor allowed the public to learn crucial technical details of the machines’ inner workings. Hari and others in India repeatedly offered to collaborate with the Election Commission to better understand the security of the machines, but they were not permitted to complete a serious review.

Then, in February of this year, an anonymous source approached Hari and offered a machine for him to study. This source requested anonymity, and we have honored this request. We have every reason to believe that the source had lawful access to the machine and made it available for scientific study as a matter of conscience, out of concern over potential security problems.

Later in February, Rop Gonggrijp and I joined Hari in Hyderabad and conducted a detailed security review of the machine. We discovered that, far from being tamperproof, it suffers from a number of weaknesses. There are many ways that dishonest election insiders or other criminals with physical access could tamper with the machines to change election results. We illustrated two ways that this could happen by constructing working demonstration attacks and detailed these findings in a research paper, Security Analysis of India’s Electronic Voting Machines. The paper recently completed peer review and will appear at the ACM Computer and Communications Security conference in October.

Our work has produced a hot debate in India. Many commentators have called for the machines to be scrapped, and 16 political parties representing almost half of the Indian parliament have expressed serious concerns about the use of electronic voting.

Earlier this month at EVT/WOTE, the leading international workshop for electronic voting research, two representatives from the Election Commission of India joined in a panel discussion with Narasimha Rao, a prominent Indian electronic voting critic, and me. (I will blog more about the panel in coming days.) After listening to the two sides argue over the security of India’s voting machines, 28 leading experts in attendance signed a letter to the Election Commission stating that “India’s [electronic voting machines] do not today provide security, verifiability, or transparency adequate for confidence in election results.”

Nevertheless, the Election Commission continues to deny that there is a security problem. Just a few days ago, Chief Election Commissioner S.Y. Quraishi told reporters that the machines “are practically totally tamper proof.”

Effects of the Arrest

This brings us to today’s arrest. Hari is spending Saturday night in a jail cell, and he told me he expects to be interrogated by the authorities in the morning. Hari has retained a lawyer, who will be flying to Mumbai in the next few hours and who hopes to be able to obtain bail within days. Hari seemed composed when I spoke to him, but he expressed great concern for his wife and children, as well as for the effect his arrest might have on other researchers who might consider studying electronic voting in India.

If any good has come from this, it’s that there has been an outpouring of support for Hari. He has received positive messages from people all over India.

Unfortunately, the entire issue distracts from the primary problem: India’s electronic voting machines have fundamental security flaws, and do not provide the transparency necessary for voters to have confidence in elections. To fix these problems, the Election Commission will need help from India’s technical community. Arresting and interrogating a key member of that community is enormously counterproductive.


Professor J. Alex Halderman is a computer scientist at the University of Michigan.

The Future of DRE Voting Machines

Last week at the EVT/WOTE workshop, Ari Feldman and I unveiled a new research project that we feel represents the future of DRE voting machines. DRE (direct-recording electronic) voting machines are ones where voters cast their ballots by pressing buttons or using a touch screen, and the primary record of the votes is stored in a computer memory. Numerous scientific studies have demonstrated that such machines can be reprogrammed to steal votes, so when we got our hands on a DRE called the Sequoia AVC Edge, we decided to do something different: we reprogrammed it to run Pac-Man.

As more states move away from using insecure DREs, there’s a risk that thousands of these machines will clog our landfills. Fortunately, our results show that they can be productively repurposed. We believe that in the not-so-distant future, recycled DREs will provide countless hours of entertainment in the basements of the nation’s nerds.

To see how we did it, visit our Pac-Man on the AVC Edge voting machine site.

School's Laptop Spying Software Exploitable from Anywhere

This post is by Jay Novak, Jon Stribley, and J. Alex Halderman.

Absolute Manage is a remote administration program that allows sysadmins to supervise and maintain client computers over the Internet. It has been in the news since early February, when Lower Merion School District in Pennsylvania was alleged to be using it to spy on students at home via their laptop webcams. The story took a new twist last Thursday, when Threat Level reported that researchers at Leviathan Security Group had discovered serious vulnerabilities in the program. These problems let attackers carry out a number of exploits, including installing malware or running other arbitrary code on the students’ laptops. The major limitation in the reported attacks is that the bad guy needs to be on the same local network as the victim, and the program’s developers, Absolute Software, says it’s a largely theoretical threat.

Unfortunately, the security problems are worse than has been reported so far, and are far from theoretical. In fact, any machine with a public IP address running Absolute Manage can be taken over by attackers anywhere on the Internet. Such an attacker can command the machine to run arbitrary code, steal data, or take photographs using the computer’s camera.

We have been investigating Absolute Manage for several months, hoping to gain a better understanding of the security measures it employs to protect users. We are disclosing this information now because, following the Threat Level post, we believe it’s only a matter of time until real attackers discover it. Users need to be aware of the vulnerabilities and take proper measures to protect themselves.

Broken Cryptography

The security issues revolve around the way Absolute Manage encrypts commands sent to the clients. The software has two parts: the Absolute Manage Agent, which runs on client machines, and the Absolute Manage Server, which tracks clients under its supervision and sends commands to perform remote operations like installing new software. The clients and server exchange messages using a TCP-based protocol. Clients continuously listen for messages containing instructions from the server, and they also periodically send “heartbeat” messages to the server to deliver status updates and pull down any queued commands.

The programs compress and encrypt each message before transmitting it. They use an encryption algorithm called Blowfish, which is a credible, if outmoded, choice. The problem is how the keys are managed. Strong encryption protocols like SSL negotiate a new secret key for each communication session, but Absolute Manage uses the same hard coded key every time, in every client. Blowfish can use variable-sized keys from 1-56 bytes, and the programmers decided to use secret textual phrases for the keys. We know what the keys are. We won’t publish them here, but they were easy to figure out by inspecting the program files.

Using hard coded keys neutralizes the benefits of cryptography. Since the same, easy-to-discover key is used in every client, it’s straightforward for an attacker to unwrap the encrypted messages, modify them, or encrypt messages of his own. This problem is very similar to the broken cryptography in Diebold voting machines that Ari, Alex, and Ed discovered years ago. Diebold also used a simple fixed key, which allowed an attacker with access to one machine to learn the key and attack all the other machines.

The broken cryptography in Absolute Manage enables a variety of attacks. For instance, an attacker can eavesdrop on a command sent from the server and rewrite it to issue a new command that installs and executes malicious code. Or, he can act as a man-in-the-middle between the client and server and insert evil commands in response to a client heartbeat message. An attacker could easily do these by sniffing wireless LAN traffic, as in school and office environments where Absolute Manage is often deployed. These seem to be the attacks referred to in the Threat Level post.

Exploitable from Anywhere

The limitation of these attacks is that the bad guy usually needs to be on the same physical network as the victim. However, we discovered that potentially more dangerous attacks are possible. In these attacks, a bad guy anywhere on the Internet can exploit any Absolute Manage client with a publicly reachable IP address.

Here’s an example of a message from the server to the client, with the encryption and compression removed. The client tries to authenticate the command using a parameter called the SeedValue. This value is provided by the server when a client initially attempts to contact it after booting. After that, the client requires the SeedValue to be the same in subsequent commands. The client basically ignores all of the other parameters that look like they would be hard to guess, so the SeedValue is the only thing that makes it difficult for the attacker to generate his own command messages from whole cloth.

In our example message, the SeedValue is:

D969E2CD0CB67F4063F45CEAC7D145B12D76A969306AE0CE

It turns out that it is encrypted using a second hard-coded textual phrase. Decrypting it yields the following bytes:

00 00 00 00 e0 03 10 03 40 03 00 00 31 00 34 00 37 00 35 00 00 00 00 00 00

The length is misleading; the value is actually just a 16-bit unicode encoding of a 7-digit number, 1401475. This is the server’s “serial number,” which was provided by Absolute Software along with the product activation key when we purchased our license.

Thus, an attacker who wants to send arbitrary commands to Absolute Manage clients just needs to figure out the server’s serial number. One way he can do that is to guess it. The attacker could try contacting the client with different values until one of them turns out to be correct. If all serial numbers are 7 digits (like ours) or less, and there is no pattern to there assignment, then an attacker can guess among 10 million possibilities. If there is a pattern (the likely case) then the attacker’s job may be much easier. Our tests show that we can make more than 330 guesses/second over a fast network link, so even assuming no pattern an attacker could expect to succeed after about four hours of guessing. Each server uses the same serial number for all its clients, so after the attacker guesses it for one client, he can compromise all the server’s other clients without any additional guesswork.

Brute forcing the server’s serial number is one method attackers can use, but there is a much more efficient attack for targeting a large set of clients: the server will tell the correct SeedValue to any client that asks. If the attacker knows the IP address of the server a client is trying to contact, he can just impersonate a freshly-booted client and ask the server to send him the correct SeedValue. The server will respond with all the information the attacker needs to impersonate the server.

A bad guy could extend this method to target all Absolute Manage clients in one attack. He could scan the entire Internet address space to discover all hosts running Absolute Manage Server and build a list of active SeedValues. (Servers generally run on public IP addresses so that they can receive status updates from clients that are away from the local network.) Such a scan would take only a few days. The attacker could then do a second Internet-wide scan to discover Absolute Manage Clients. For each of them, he would need only a few seconds to try all the active SeedValues from his list and determine the correct one. This attack could be exploited to quickly install and run malicious code on all computers running the Absolute Manage client on publicly accessible IP addresses.

Defenses and Lessons

In the short term, users can protect themselves by uninstalling the Absolute Manage client. This might be difficult on machines with privileges locked down, so system administrators will need to help.

(Attempts to work around the problem, such as firewalling the server so it can’t be found by an Internet scan, may backfire. If the server is unreachable from outside the firewall, clients that are rebooted away from the local network will be unable to obtain a SeedValue. In this situation, the clients insecurely default to accepting arbitrary commands without even the protection of a SeedValue.)

In the long term, the solution is for Absolute Manage to adopt serious cryptographic authentication. Absolute Software says they will do this in the next version later this summer–let’s hope they get it right next time.

Remote administration products like Absolute Manage carry large risks because they intentionally create a mechanism for a remote third party to take control of the machine. This can be powerful in the right hands but devastating if exploited by attackers. There will always be a risk of abuse by authorized parties, as alleged in the students’ lawsuit against Lower Merion School District, but correctly designed technology should at least prevent unauthorized third-party attacks by making sure only authorized parties can issue commands. This requires getting authentication right–exactly what Absolute Manage failed to do.

Because of these dangers, remote administration software should be designed defensively, minimizing the risk even if the authentication fails. For example, it could only allow installation of signed binaries, or it could give users prominent notification before actions are taken so that attacks can be more easily detected.

The blatant vulnerabilities in Absolute Manage suggest that this kind of remote administration software requires greater security scrutiny. We will further discuss the problems and the lessons they carry in a forthcoming paper.

Amazon’s MP3 Store Wisely Forgoes Watermarks

Last week Amazon.com launched a DRM-free music store. It sells tracks from two major labels and many independents in the unprotected MP3 file format. In addition to being DRM-free, Amazon’s songs are not individually watermarked. This is an important step forward for the music industry.

Some content companies see individualized watermarks as a consumer-friendly alternative to DRM. Instead of locking down files with restrictive technology, individualized watermarking places information in them that identifies the purchasers, who could conceivably face legal action if the files were publicly shared. Apple individually watermarks DRM-free tracks sold on iTunes, but every customer who purchases a particular track from Amazon receives the exact same file. The company has stated as much, and colleagues and I confirmed this by buying a small number of files with different Amazon accounts and verifying that they were bit-for-bit identical. (As Wired reports, some files on Amazon’s store have been watermarked by the record labels, but each copy sold contains the same mark. The labels could use these marks to determine that a pirated track originated from Amazon, but they can’t trace a file to a particular user.)

Individualized watermarks give purchasers an incentive not to share the files they buy, or so the theory goes, but, like DRM, even if watermarking does reduce copyright infringement, that doesn’t necessarily mean it makes business sense. Watermarks create legal risks even for customers who don’t engage in file sharing, because the files might still become publicly available due to software misconfigurations or other security breaches. These risks add to the effective cost of buying music for legitimate purchasers, who will buy less as a result.

The difference in risk between a customer who chooses to share purchased files and one who does not is ultimately determined by computer security issues that are outside the content industry’s control. Aside from users who are caught red-handed sharing the files, who can be sued even without watermarks, infringers and noninfringers will share a multitude of plausible defenses. Their songs might have been copied by spyware. (If watermarking becomes widespread, spyware authors will probably target watermarked files, uploading them to peer to peer networks without users’ knowledge.) They might have been leaked from a discarded hard drive or backup tape, or recovered from a stolen laptop or iPod. The industry will need to fight such claims in order to bring suit against actual infringers, leaving noninfringers to worry that they could face the same fate regardless of their good intentions.

With individualized watermarking, there’s no knob that the content industry can set that varies the disincentive for sharing purchased files independently of the disincentive for purchasing them at all. Inevitably, legitimate customers will be scared away. This makes individualized watermarking a blunt antipiracy tool and a bad bet for the content industry. Amazon was wise not to use it.