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Internet Voting

February 4, 2008 by

(or, how I learned to stop worrying and love having the whole world know exactly how I voted)

Tomorrow is “Super Tuesday” in the United States. Roughly half of the delegates to the Democratic and Republican conventions will be decided tomorrow, and the votes will be cast either in a polling place or through the mail. Except for the votes cast online. Yes, over the Internet.

The Libertarian Party of Arizona is conducting its entire primary election online. Arizona’s Libertarian voters who wish to participate in its primary election have no choice but to vote online. Also, the Democratic Party is experimenting with online voting for overseas voters.

Abridged history: The U.S. military has been pushing hard on getting something like this in place, most famously commissioning a system called “SERVE”. To their credit, they hired several smart security people to evaluate their security. Four of those experts published an independent report that was strongly critical of the system, notably pointing out the obvious problem with such a scheme: home computers are notoriously insecure. It’s easy to imagine viruses and whatnot being engineered to specifically watch for attempts to use the computer to vote and to specifically tamper with those votes, transparently shifting votes in the election. The military killed the program, later replacing it with a vote-by-fax scheme. It’s unclear whether this represents a security improvement, but it probably makes it easier to deal with the diversity of ballot styles.

Internet voting has also been used in a variety of other places, including Estonia. An Estonian colleague of mine demonstrated the system for me. He inserted his national ID card (a smartcard) into a PCMCIA card reader in his laptop. This allowed him to authenticate to an official government web site where he could then cast his vote. He was perfectly comfortable letting me watch the whole process because he said that he could go back and cast his vote again later, in private, overriding the vote that I saw him cast. This scheme partly addresses the risk of voter coercion and bribery (see sidebar), but it doesn’t do anything for the insecurity of the client platform.

Okay, then, how does the Arizona Libertarian party do it? You can visit their web site and click here to vote. I went as far as a web page, hosted by fairvotelections.com, which asked me for my name, birth year, house address number (i.e., for “600 Main Street”, I would enter “600”), and zip code. Both this web page and the page to which it “posts” its response are “http” pages. No cryptography is used, but then the information you’re sending isn’t terribly secret, either. Do they support Estonian-style vote overriding? Unclear. None of the links or information say a single word about security. The lack of SSL is strongly indicative of a lack of sophistication (although they did set a tracking cookie to an opaque value of some sort).

How about Democrats Abroad? If you go to their web site, you end up at VoteFromAbroad.org, which gives you two choices. You can download a PDF of the ballot, print it and mail or fax it in. Or, you can vote online via the Internet, which helpfully tells you:

Is it safe to vote by Internet? Secure Internet voting is powered by Everyone Counts, a leading expert in high-integrity online elections. We are using the same system the Michigan Democratic Party has used since 2004. Alternatively, you will have the option to vote by post, fax or in-person at Voting Centers in 34 countries around the world.

The registration system, unlike the Arizona one, at least operates over SSL. Regardless, it would seem to have all the same problems. In a public radio interview with Weekend America, Meredith Gowan LeGoff, vice chairman of Democrats Abroad, responded to a question about security issues:

Where I grew up, the dead still vote in Louisiana. There are lots of things that could potentially go wrong in any election. This might be a big challenge to a hacker somewhere. We’re hoping a hacker might care more about democracy than hacking. But we’re not depending on that. We have a lot of processes, and we’ve also chosen an outside vendor, Everyone Counts, to run the online voting.

The best we can do is the same as New Hampshire or Michigan or anywhere else, and that’s to have the members of our list and correspond that to who actually voted. Another important thing to remember is that our ballots are actually public. So you have to give your name and your address, so it’s not secret and it’s not anonymous. It’s probably easier to catch than someone in Mississippi going across to Alabama and trying to vote again.

Ahh, now there’s an interesting choice of security mechanisms. Every vote is public! For starters, this would be completely unacceptable in a general election. It’s debatable what value it has in a party election. Review time: there are two broadly different ways that U.S. political parties select their candidates, and it tends to vary from state to state. Caucuses, most famously used in Iowa, are a very public affair. In the Iowa Democratic caucuses, people stand up, speak their mind, and literally vote with their feet by where they sit or stand in the room. The Iowa Republicans, for contrast, cast their votes secretly. (Wikipedia has all the details.) Primary elections may or may not be anonymous, depending on the state. Regardless, for elections in areas dominated by a single political party, the primary election might as well be the final election, so it’s not hard to argue in favor of anonymous voting in primaries.

On the flip side, maybe we shouldn’t care about voter anonymity. Publish everybody’s name and how they voted in the newspaper. Needless to say, that would certainly simplify the security problem. Whether it would be good for democracy or not, however, is a completely different question.

[Sidebar: bribery and coercion. You don’t have to be a scholar of election history or a crazy conspiracy nut to believe that bribery and coercion are real and pressing issues in elections. Let’s examine the Estonian scheme, described above, for its resistance to bribery to coercion. The fundamental security mechanism used for voter privacy is the ability to vote anew, overriding an earlier vote. Thus, in order to successfully coerce a vote, the coercer must defeat the voter’s ability to vote again. Given that voting requires voters to have their national ID cards, the simplest answer would be to “help” voters vote “correctly”, then collect their ID cards, returning them after the election is over. You could minimize the voter’s inconvenience by doing this on the last possible day to cast a vote.

It’s important to point out that voting in a polling place may still be subject to bribery or coercion. For example, camera-phones with a video mode can record the act of casting a vote on an electronic voting system. Traditional secret-ballot paper systems are vulnerable to a chain-voting attack, where the voter is given a completed ballot before they enter the polls and returns with a fresh, unvoted ballot. Even sophisticated end-to-end voting schemes like ThreeBallot or Punchscan may be subject to equally sophisticated attacks (see these slides from John Kelsey).]

Filed Under: Other Topics, Privacy & Security Tagged With: ,

MySpace Photos Leaked; Payback for Not Fixing Flaw?

January 28, 2008 by

Last week an anonymous person published a file containing half a million images, many of which had been gathered from private profiles on MySpace. This may be the most serious privacy breach yet at MySpace. Kevin Poulsen’s story at Wired News implies that the leak may have been deliberate payback for MySpace failing to fix the vulnerability that allowed the leaks.

“I think the greatest motivator was simply to prove that it could be done,” file creator “DMaul” says in an e-mail interview. “I made it public that I was saving these images. However, I am certain there are mischievous individuals using these hacks for nefarious purposes.”

The MySpace hole surfaced last fall, and it was quickly seized upon by the self-described pedophiles and ordinary voyeurs who used it, among other things, to target 14- and 15-year-old users who’d caught their eye online. A YouTube video showed how to use the bug to retrieve private profile photos. The bug also spawned a number of ad-supported sites that made it easy to retrieve photos. One such site reported more than 77,000 queries before MySpace closed the hole last Friday following Wired News’ report.

…

MySpace plugged a a href=”http://grownupgeek.blogspot.com/2006/08/myspace-closes-giant-security-hole.html”>similar security hole in August 2006 when it made the front page of Digg, four months after it surfaced.

The implication here, not quite stated, is that DMaul was trying to draw attention to the flaw in order to force MySpace to fix it. If this is what it took to get MySpace to fix the flaw, this story reflects very badly on MySpace.

Anyone who has discovered security flaws in commercial products knows that companies react to flaws in two distinct ways. Smart companies react constructively: they’re not happy about the flaws or the subsequent PR fallout, but they acknowledge the truth and work in their customers’ interest to fix problems promptly. Other companies deny problems and delay addressing them, treating security flaws solely as PR problems rather than real risks.

Smart companies have learned that a constructive response minimizes the long-run PR damage and, not coincidentally, protects customers. But some companies seem to lock themselves into the deny-delay strategy.

Now suppose you know that a company’s product has a flaw that is endangering its customers, and the company is denying and delaying. There is something you can do that will force them to fix the problem – you can arrange an attention-grabbing demonstration that will show customers (and the press) that the risk is real. All you have to do is exploit the flaw yourself, get a bunch of private data, and release it. Which is pretty much what DMaul did.

To be clear, I’m not endorsing this course of action. I’m just pointing out why someone might find it attractive despite the obvious ethical objections.

The really interesting aspect of Poulsen’s article is that he doesn’t quite connect the dots and say that DMaul meant to punish MySpace. But Poulsen is savvy enough that he probably wouldn’t have missed the implication either, and he could have written the article to avoid it had he wanted to. Maybe I’m reading too much into the article, but I can’t help suspecting that DMaul was trying to punish MySpace for its lax security.

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Scoble/Facebook Incident: It's Not About Data Ownership

January 8, 2008 by

Last week Facebook canceled, and then reinstated, Robert Scoble’s account because he was using an automated script to export information about his Facebook friends to another service. The incident triggered a vigorous debate about who was in the right. Should Scoble be allowed to export this data from Facebook in the way he did? Should Facebook be allowed to control how the data is presented and used? What about the interests of Scoble’s friends?

An interesting meme kept popping up in this debate: the idea that somebody owns the data. Kara Swisher says the data belong to Scoble:

Thus, [Facebook] has zero interest in allowing people to escape easily if they want to, even though THE INFORMATION ON FACEBOOK IS THEIRS AND NOT FACEBOOK’S.

Sorry for the caps, but I wanted to be as clear as I could: All that information on Facebook is Robert Scoble’s. So, he should–even if he agreed to give away his rights to move it to use the service in the first place (he had no other choice if he wanted to join)–be allowed to move it wherever he wants.

Nick Carr disagrees, saying the data belong to Scoble’s friends:

Now, if you happen to be one of those “friends,” would you think of your name, email address, and birthday as being “Scoble’s data” or as being “my data.” If you’re smart, you’ll think of it as being “my data,” and you’ll be very nervous about the ability of someone to easily suck it out of Facebook’s database and move it into another database without your knowledge or permission. After all, if someone has your name, email address, and birthday, they pretty much have your identity – not just your online identity, but your real-world identity.

Scott Karp asks whether “Facebook actually own your data because you agreed to that ownership in the Terms of Service.” And Louis Gray titles his post “The Data Ownership Wars Are Heating Up”.

Where did we get this idea that facts about the world must be owned by somebody? Stop and consider that question for a minute, and you’ll see that ownership is a lousy way to think about this issue. In fact, much of the confusion we see stems from the unexamined assumption that the facts in question are owned.

It’s worth noting, too, that even today’s expansive intellectual property regimes don’t apply to the data at issue here. Facts aren’t copyrightable; there’s no trade secret here; and this information is outside the subject matter of patents and trademarks.

Once we give up the idea that the fact of Robert Scoble’s friendship with (say) Lee Aase, or the fact that that friendship has been memorialized on Facebook, has to be somebody’s exclusive property, we can see things more clearly. Scoble and Aase both have an interest in the facts of their Facebook-friendship and their real friendship (if any). Facebook has an interest in how its computer systems are used, but Scoble and Aase also have an interest in being able to access Facebook’s systems. Even you and I have an interest here, though probably not so strong as the others, in knowing whether Scoble and Aase are Facebook-friends.

How can all of these interests best be balanced in principle? What rights do Scoble, Aase, and Facebook have under existing law? What should public policy says about data access? All of these are difficult questions whose answers we should debate. Declaring these facts to be property doesn’t resolve the debate – all it does is rule out solutions that might turn out to be the best.

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Obama's Digital Policy

December 28, 2007 by

The Iowa caucuses, less than a week away, will kick off the briefest and most intense series of presidential primaries in recent history. That makes it a good time to check in on what the candidates are saying about digital technologies. Between now and February 5th (the 23-state tsunami of primaries that may well resolve the major party nominations), we’ll be taking a look.

First up: Barack Obama. A quick glance at the sites of other candidates suggests that Obama is an outlier – none of the other major players has gone into anywhere near the level of detail that he has in their official campaign output. That may mean we’ll be tempted to spend a disproportionate amount of time talking about him – but if so, I guess that’s the benefit he reaps by paying attention. Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch tech primary provides the best summary I’ve found, compiled from other sources, of candidates’ positions on tech issues, and we may find ourselves relying on that over the next few weeks.

For Obama, we have a detailed “Technology and Innovation” white paper. It spans a topical area that Europeans often refer to as ICTs – information and communications technologies. That means basically anything digital, plus the analog ambit of the FCC (media concentration, universal service and so on). Along the way, other areas get passing mention – immigration of high tech workers, trade policy, energy efficiency.

Net neutrality may be the most talked about tech policy issue in Washington – it has generated a huge amount of constituent mail, perhaps as many as 600,000 constituent letters. Obama is clear on this: He says requiring ISPs to provide “accurate and honest information about service plans” that may violate neutrality is “not enough.” He wants a rule to stop network operators from charging “fees to privilege the content or applications of some web sites and Internet applications over others.” I think that full transparency about non-neutral Internet service may indeed be enough, an idea I first got from a comment on this blog, but in any case it’s nice to have a clear statement of view.

Where free speech collides with child protection, Obama faces the structural challenge, common to Democrats, of simultaneously appeasing both the entertainment industry and concerned moms. Predictably, he ends up engaging in a little wishful thinking:

On the Internet, Obama will require that parents have the option of receiving parental controls software that not only blocks objectionable Internet content but also prevents children from revealing personal information through their home computer.

The idealized version of such software, in which unwanted communications are stopped while desirable ones remain unfettered, is typically quite far from what the technology can actually provide. The software faces a design tradeoff between being too broad, in which case desirable use is stopped, and too narrow, in which case undesirable online activity is permitted. That might be why Internet filtering software, despite being available commercially, isn’t already ubiquitous. Given that parents can already buy it, Obama’s aim to “require that parents have the option of receiving” such software sounds like a proposal for the software to be subsidized or publicly funded; I doubt that would make it better.

On privacy, the Obama platform again reflects a structural problem. Voters seem eager for a President who will have greater concern for statutory law than the current incumbent does. But some of the secret and possibly illegal reductions of privacy that have gone on at the NSA and elsewhere may actually (in the judgment of those privy to the relevant secrets) be indispensable. So Obama, like many others, favors “updating surveillance laws.” He’ll follow the law, in other words, but first he wants it modified so that it can be followed without unduly tying his hands. That’s very likely the most reasonable kind of view a presidential candidate could have, but it doesn’t tell us how much privacy citizens will enjoy if he gets his way. The real question, unanswered in this platform, is exactly which updates Obama would favor. He himself is probably reserving judgment until, briefed by the intelligence community, he can competently decide what updates are needed.

My favorite part of the document, by far, is the section on government transparency. (I’d be remiss were I not to shamelessly plug the panel on exactly this topic at CITP’s upcoming January workshop.) The web is enabling amazing new levels, and even new kinds, of sunlight to accompany the exercise of public power. If you haven’t experienced MAPlight, which pairs campaign contribution data with legislators’ votes, then you should spend the next five minutes watching this video. Josh Tauberer, who launched Govtrack.us, has pointed out that one major impediment to making these tools even better is the reluctance of government bodies to adopt convenient formats for the data they publish. A plain text page (typical fare on existing government sites like THOMAS) meets the letter of the law, but an open format with rich metadata would see the same information put to more and better use.

Obama’s stated position is to make data available “online in universally accessible formats,” a clear nod in this direction. He also calls for live video feeds of government proceedings. One more radical proposal, camoflaged among these others, is

…pilot programs to open up government decision-making and involve the public in the work of agencies, not simply by soliciting opinions, but by tapping into the vast and distributed expertise of the American citizenry to help government make more informed decisions.

I’m not sure what that means, but it sounds exciting. If I wanted to start using wikis to make serious public policy decisions – and needed to make the idea sound simple and easy – that’s roughly how I might put it.

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Ohio Study: Scariest E-Voting Security Report Yet

December 18, 2007 by

The State of Ohio released the report of a team of computer scientists it commissioned to study the state’s e-voting systems. Though it’s a stiff competition, this may qualify as the scariest e-voting study report yet.

This was the most detailed study yet of the ES&S iVotronic system, and it confirmss the results of the earlier Florida State study. The study found many ways to subvert ES&S systems.

The ES&S system, like its competitors, is subject to viral attacks that can spread from one voting machine to others, and to the central vote tabulation systems.

Anyone with access to a machine can re-calibrate the touchscreen to affect how the machine records votes (page 50):

A terminal can be maliciously re-calibrated (by a voter or poll worker) to prevent voting for certain candidates or to cause voter input for one candidate to be recorded for another.

Worse yet, the system’s access control can be defeated by a poll worker or an ordinary voter, using only a small magnet and a PDA or cell phone (page 50).

Some administrative functions require entry of a password, but there is an undocumented backdoor function that lets a poll worker or voter with a magnet and PDA bypass the password requirements (page 51).

The list of problems goes on and on. It’s inconceivable that the iVotronic could have undergone any kind of serious security review before being put on the market. It’s also unclear how the machine managed to get certified.

Even if you don’t think anyone would try to steal an election, this should still scare you. A machine with so many design errors must also be susceptible to misrecording or miscounting votes due to the ordinary glitches and errors that always plague computer systems. Even if all poll workers and voters were angels, this machine would be too risky to use.

This is yet more evidence that today’s paperless e-voting machines can’t be trusted.

[Correction (December 18): I originally wrote that this was the first independent study of the iVotronic. In fact, the Florida State team studied the iVotronic first and reported many problems. The new report confirms the Florida State report, and provides some new details. My apologies to the Florida State team for omitting their work.]

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