Sarasota Voting Machines Insecure

The technical team commissioned by the State of Florida to study the technology used in the ill-fated Sarasota election has released its report. (Background: on the Sarasota election problems; on the study.)

One revelation from the study is that the iVotronic touch-screen voting machines are terribly insecure. The machines are apparently susceptible to viruses, and there are many bugs a virus could exploit to gain entry or spread:

We found many instances of [exploitable buffer overflow bugs]. Misplaced trust in the election definition file can be found throughout the iVotronic software. We found a number of buffer overruns of this type. The software also contains array out-of-bounds errors, integer overflow vulnerabilities, and other security holes. [page 57]

The equation is simple: sloppy software + removable storage = virus vulnerability. We saw the same thing with the Diebold touchscreen voting system.

Another example of poor security is in the passwords that protect crucial operations such as configuring the voting machine and modifying its software. There are separate passwords for different operations, but the system has a single backdoor that allows all of the passwords to be bypassed by an adversary who can learn or guess a one-byte secret, which is easily guessed since there are only 256 possibilities. (p. 67) For example, an attacker who gets private access to the machine for just a few minutes can apparently use the backdoor to install malicious software onto a machine.

Though the machines’ security is poor and needs to be fixed before it is used in another election, I agree with the study team that the undervotes were almost certainly not caused by a security attack. The reason is simple: only a brainless attacker would cause undervotes. An attack that switched votes from one candidate to another would be more effective and much harder to detect.

So if it wasn’t a security attack, what was the cause of the undervotes?

Experience teaches that systems that are insecure tend to be unreliable as well – they tend to go wrong on their own even if nobody is attacking them. Code that is laced with buffer overruns, array out-of-bounds errors, integer overflow errors, and the like tends to be flaky. Sporadic undervotes are the kind of behavior you would expect to see from a flaky voting technology.

The study claims to have ruled out reliability problems as a cause of the undervotes, but their evidence on this point is weak, and I think the jury is still out on whether voting machine malfunctions could be a significant cause of the undervotes. I’ll explain why, in more detail, in the next post.