Freedom to Tinker

During the New Jersey voting machines lawsuit, the State defendants tried first one set of security seals and then another in their vain attempts to show that the ROM chips containing vote-counting software could be protected against fraudulent replacement. After one or two rounds of this, Plaintiffs engaged Dr. Roger Johnston, an expert on physical security and tamper-indicating seals, to testify about New Jersey’s insecure use of seals.

In his day job, Roger is a scientist at the Argonne National Laboratory, working to secure (among other things) our nation’s shipments of nuclear materials. He has many years of experience in the scientific study of security seals and their use protocols, as well as physical security in general. In this trial he testified in his private capacity, pro bono.

He wrote an expert report in which he analyzed the State’s proposed use of seals to secure voting machines (what I am calling “Seal Regime #2” and “Seal Regime #3”). For some of these seals, he and his team of technicians have much slicker techniques to defeat these seals than I was able to come up with. Roger chooses not to describe the methods in detail, but he has prepared this report for the public.

What I found most instructive about Roger’s report (including in version he has released publicly) is that he explains that you can’t get security just by looking at the individual seal. Instead, you must consider the entire seal use protocol:

Seal use protocols are the formal and informal procedures for choosing, procuring, transporting, storing, securing, assigning, installing, inspecting, removing, and destroying seals. Other components of a seal use protocol include procedures for securely keeping track of seal serial numbers, and the training provided to seal installers and inspectors. The procedures for how to inspect the object or container onto which seals are applied is another aspect of a seal use protocol. Seals and a tamper-detection program are no better than the seal use protocols that are in place.

He explains that inspecting seals for evidence of tampering is not at all straightforward. Inspection often requires removing the seal—for example, when you pull off an adhesive-tape seal that’s been tampered with, it behaves differently than one that’s undisturbed. A thorough inspection may involve comparing the seal with microphotographs of the same seal taken just after it was originally applied.

For each different seal that’s used, one can develop a training program for the seal inspectors. Because the state proposed to use four different kinds of seals, it would need four different sets training materials. Training all the workers who would inspect the State’s 10,000 voting machines would be quite expensive. With all those seals, just the seal inspections themselves would cost over $100,000 per election.

His report also discusses “security culture.”

“Security culture” is the official and unofficial, formal and informal behaviors, attitudes, perceptions, strategies, rules, policies, and practices associated with security. There is a consensus among security experts that a healthy security culture is required for effective security….

A healthy security culture is one in which security is integrated into everyday work, management, planning, thinking, rules, policies, and risk management; where security is considered as a key issue at all employee levels (and not just an afterthought); where security is a proactive, rather than reactive activity; where security measures are carefully defined, and frequently reviewed and studied; where security experts are involved in choosing and reviewing security strategies, practices, and products; where the organization constantly seeks proactively to understand vulnerabilities and provide countermeasures; where input on potential security problems are eagerly considered from any quarter; and where wishful thinking and denial is deliberately avoided in regards to threats, risks, adversaries, vulnerabilities, and the insider threat….

Throughout his deposition … Mr. Giles [Director of the NJ Division of Elections] indicates that he believes good physical security requires a kind of band-aid approach, where serious security vulnerabilities can be covered over with ad hoc fixes or the equivalent of software patches. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Roger Johnston’s testimony about the importance of seal use protocols—as considered separately from the individual seals themselves—made a strong impression on the judge: in the remedy that the Court ordered, seal use protocols as defined by Dr. Johnston played a prominent role.

In this post I’ll tell you the trick to defeating physical tamper-evident seals.

When I signed on as an expert witness in the New Jersey voting-machines lawsuit, voting machines in New Jersey used hardly any security seals. The primary issues were in my main areas of expertise: computer science and computer security.

Even so, when the state stuck a bunch of security seals on their voting machines in October 2008, I found that I could easily defeat them. I sent in a supplement expert report to the Court, explaining how.

Soon after I sent in my report about how to defeat all the State’s new seals, in January 2009 the State told the Court that it was abandoning all those seals, and that it had new seals for the voting machines. As before, I obtained samples of these new seals, and went down to my basement to work on them.

In a day or two, I figured out how to defeat all those new seals.

• The vinyl tamper-indicating tape can be defeated using packing tape, a razor blade, and (optionally) a heat gun.
• The blue padlock seal can be defeated with a portable drill and a couple of jigs that I made from scrap metal.
• The security screw cap can be defeated with a $5 cold chisel and a $10 long-nose pliers, each custom ground on my bench grinder.

For details and pictures, see “Seal Regime #3” in this paper.

The main trick is this: just to know that physical seals are, in general, easy to defeat. Once you know that, then it’s just a matter of thinking about how to do it, and having a pile of samples on which to experiment. In fact, the techniques I describe in my paper are not the only way to defeat these seals, or the best way—not even close. These techniques are what an amateur could come up with. But these seal-defeats were good enough to work just fine when I demonstrated them in the courtroom during my testimony, and they would almost certainly not be detected by the kinds of seal-inspection protocols that most states (including New Jersey) use for election equipment.

(In addition, the commenters on my previous post describe a very simple denial-of-service attack on elections: brazenly cut or peel all the seals in sight. Then what will the election officials do? In principle they should throw out the ballots or data covered by those seals. But then what? “Do-overs” of elections are rare and messy. I suspect the most common action in this case is not even to notice anything wrong; and the second most common is to notice it but say nothing. Nobody wants to rock the boat.)