Archives for April 2009

Sometimes, working on voting seems like running on a treadmill. Old disagreements need to be argued again and again. As long as I’ve been speaking in public about voting, I’ve discussed the need for voting systems’ source code to be published, as in a book, to create transparency into how the systems operate. Or, put another way, trade secrecy is anathema to election transparency. We, the people, have an expectation that our election policies and procedures are open to scrutiny, and that critical scrutiny is essential to the exercise of our Democracy. (Cue the waving flags.)

On Tuesday, the Election Technology Council (a trade association of four major American voting system manufacturers) put out a white paper on open-source and voting systems. It’s nice to see them finally talking about the issue, but there’s a distinctive cluelessness in this paper about what, exactly, open source is and what it means for a system to be secure. For example, in a sidebar titled “Disclosed vs. Open: Clarifying Misconceptions”, the report states:

… taking a software product that was once proprietary and disclosing its full source code to the general public will result in a complete forfeiture of the software’s security … Although computer scientists chafe at the thought of “security through obscurity,” there remains some underlying truths to the idea that software does maintain a level of security through the lack of available public knowledge of the inner workings of a software program.

Really? No. Disclosing the source code only results in a complete forfeiture of the software’s security if there was never any security there in the first place. If the product is well-engineered, then disclosing the software will cause no additional security problems. If the product is poorly-engineered, then the lack of disclosure only serves the purpose of delaying the inevitable.

What we learned from the California Top-to-Bottom Review and the Ohio EVEREST study was that, indeed, these systems are unquestionably and unconscionably insecure. The authors of those reports (including yours truly) read the source code, which certainly made it easier to identify just how bad these systems were, but it’s fallacious to assume that a prospective attacker, lacking the source code and even lacking our reports, is somehow any less able to identify and exploit the flaws. The wide diversity of security flaws exploited on a regular basis in Microsoft Windows completely undercuts the ETC paper’s argument. The bad guys who build these attacks have no access to Windows’s source code, but they don’t need it. With common debugging tools (as well as customized attacking tools), they can tease apart the operation of the compiled, executable binary applications and engineer all sorts of malware.

Voting systems, in this regard, are just like Microsoft Windows. We have to assume, since voting machines are widely dispersed around the country, that attackers will have the opportunity to tear them apart and extract the machine code. Therefore, it’s fair to argue that source disclosure, or the lack thereof, has no meaningful impact on the operational security of our electronic voting machines. They’re broken. They need to be repaired.

The ETC paper also seems to confuse disclosed source (published, as in a book) with open source (e.g., under a GPL or BSD license). For years, I’ve been suggesting that the former would be a good thing, and I haven’t taken a strong position on the latter. Even further, the ETC paper seems to assume that open source projects are necessarily driven by volunteer labor, rather than by companies. See, for example:

… if proprietary software is ripped open through legislative fiat, whatever security features exist are completely lost until such time that the process improvement model envisioned by the open source community has an opportunity to take place (Hall 2007).

There are plenty of open-source projects that are centrally maintained by commercial companies with standard, commercial development processes. There’s no intrinsic reason that software source code disclosure or open licensing makes any requirements on the development model. And, just because software is suddenly open, there’s indeed no guarantee that a community of developers will magically appear and start making improvements. Successful open source communities arise when distinct developers or organizations share a common need.

Before I go on, I’ll note that the ETC report has cherry-picked citations to support its cause, and those citations are neither being used honestly nor completely. The above citation to Joe Hall’s 2007 EVT paper distorts Hall’s opinions. His actual paper, which surveys 55 contracts between voting system manufacturers and the jurisdictions that buy them, makes very specific recommendations, including that these contracts should allow for source code review in the pre-election, post-election, and litigation stages of the election cycle. Hall is arguing in favor of source code disclosure, yet the citation to his paper would seem to have him arguing against it!

So, how would open source (or disclosed source) work in the commercial voting machine industry? The ETC paper suggests that it might be difficult to get an open-source project off the ground with distributed development by volunteers. This is perfectly believable. Consequently, that’s not how it would ever work. As I said above, I’ve always advocated for disclosure, but let’s think through how a genuine open-source voting machine might succeed. A likely model is that a state, coalition of states, or even the Federal government would need to step in to fund the development of these systems. The development organization would most likely be a non-profit company, along the lines of the many Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDCs) already in existence. Our new voting FFRDC, presumably sponsored by the EAC, would develop the source code and get it certified. It would also standardize the hardware interface, allowing multiple vendors to build compatible hardware. Because the code would be open, these hardware vendors would be free to make enhancements or to write device drivers, which would then go back to the FFRDC for integration and testing. (The voting FFRDC wouldn’t try to take the code to existing voting systems, so there’s no worry about stealing their IP. It’s easier to just start from scratch.) My hypothetical FFRDC model isn’t too far away from how Linux is managed, or even how Microsoft manages Windows, so this isn’t exactly science fiction.

The ETC paper asks who would develop new features as might be required by a customer and suggests that the “lack of a clear line of accountability for maintaining an open source project” would hinder this process. In my hypothetical FFRDC model, the customer could commission their own programmers to develop the enhancement and contribute this back to the FFRDC for integration. The customer could also directly commission the FFRDC or any other third-party to develop something that suits their needs. They could test it locally in mock elections, but ultimately their changes would need to pass muster with the FFRDC and the still-independent certification and testing authorities. (Or, the FFRDC could bring the testing/certification function in-house or NIST could be funded to do it. That’s a topic for another day.) And, of course, other countries would be free to adopt our hardware and customize our software for their own needs.

Unfortunately, such a FFRDC structure seems unlikely to occur in the immediate future. Who’s going to pay for it? Like it or not, we’re going to be stuck with the present voting system manufacturers and their poorly engineered products for a while. The challenge is to keep clarity on what’s necessary to improve their security engineering. By requiring source code disclosure, we improve election transparency, and we can keep pressure on the vendors to improve their systems. If the security flaws found two years ago in the California and Ohio studies haven’t been properly fixed by one vendor while another is making progress, that progress will be visible and we can recommend that the slow vendor be dropped.

A secondary challenge is to counter the sort of mischaracterizations that are still, sadly, endemic from the voting system industry. Consider this quote:

If policymakers attempt to strip the intellectual property from voting system software, it raises two important areas of concern. The first is the issue of property takings without due process and compensation which is prohibited under the United States Constitution. The second area of concern is one of security. The potential for future gains with software security will be lost in the short-term until such time that an adequate product improvement model is incorporated. Without a process improvement model in place, any security features present in current software would be lost. At the same time, the market incentives for operating and supporting voting products would be eliminated.

For starters, requiring the disclosure of source code does not represent any sort of “taking” of the code. Vendors would still own copyrights to their code. Furthermore, they may still avail themselves of the patent system to protect their intellectual property. Their only loss would be of the trade secret privilege.

And again, we’ve got the bogus security argument combined with some weird process improvement model business. Nobody says that disclosing your source requires you to change your process. Instead, the undisputed fact that these vendors’ systems are poorly engineered requires them to improve their processes (and what have they been doing for the past two years?), which would be necessary regardless of whether the source code is publicly disclosed.

Last but not least, it’s important to refute one more argument:

Public oversight is arguably just as diminished in an open source environment since the layperson is unable to read and understand software source code adequately enough to ensure total access and comprehension. … However, effective oversight does not need to be predicated on the removal of intellectual property protections. Providing global access to current proprietary software would undermine the principles of intellectual property and severely damage the viability of the current marketplace.

Nobody has ever suggested that election transparency requires the layperson to be able to understand the source code. Rather, it requires the layperson to be able to trust their newspaper, or political party, or Consumer Reports, or the League of Women Voters, to be able to retain their own experts and reach their own conclusions.

As to the “principles of intellectual property”, the ETC paper conflates and confuses copyright, patent, and trade secrets. Any sober analysis must consider these distinctly. As to the “viability of the current marketplace”, the market demands products that are meaningfully secure, usable, reliable, and affordable. So long as the present vendors fail on one or more of these counts, their markets will suffer.

Update: Gordon Haff chimes in at cnet, on how the ETC misconceptions about how open source development procedures work are far from atypical.