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9/5/2007 Rice's Wallach finds flaws in e-voting system used in Harris County
Wallach said the same security flaws his team uncovered in California apply to Texas voters who use eSlate. "The electronic voting machines used in California have voter-verified printers attached, which can be audited against the electronic records," said Wallach, associate professor of computer science. "Texas does not yet allow these printers, so if anything, Texas voters are at greater risk for security failures of their voting systems." The report Wallach coauthored, "Source Code Review of the Hart InterCivic Voting System," is available online at the California secretary of state's Web site, along with similar reports on widely used electronic voting systems made by Diebold Inc. and Sequoia Voting Systems. Hart InterCivic and other voting machine manufacturers have taken issue with the findings. The reports were part of a top-to-bottom review of electronic voting systems ordered by California Secretary of State Debra Bowen. Wallach and his coauthors examined and reported on weaknesses in the source code of the eSlate system and other Hart InterCivic voting systems used in California. Other teams examined the source code of Diebold and Sequoia's systems. The source code research was coordinated by the University of California, Berkeley. Each study found significant security vulnerabilities, which led to sanctions from the California secretary of state. In the wake of the reports, Bowen decertified and conditionally recertified the eSlate system and several others for use in California's February primary and imposed a variety of conditions and restrictions on how the machines should be used during the election and audited afterward. In the eSlate study, Wallach's team found a number of vulnerabilities that attackers might be able to exploit to alter the outcome of an election. Examples of potential problems include poor management of cryptographic keys and access to device management software, inadequate mechanisms for detecting attacks and potential avenues for compromising voter privacy. In one case, the team found that brief access to a single eSlate voting machine at a polling place could potentially be used to insert malicious code that could spread, in viral fashion, to every voting machine used by the county. "These attacks could be mounted by a poll worker or possibly by a voter while in the process of voting," the report said. "Subversion of single polling place devices can be used to mount a variety of vote-forgery and ballot-stuffing attacks." In a written response to the review, Neil McClure, Hart InterCivic's chief technology officer, made note of the extensive ongoing security efforts his company has undertaken. He said there are inherent tradeoffs between security, usability and system cost, and electronic voting manufacturers have grappled with where to make these tradeoffs in the absence of national standards. "Without some agreed-to parameters surrounding security, the security debate will continue without resolution, and all parties will suffer, including the public through their lack of confidence in the U.S. election process," McClure wrote. Wallach is associate director of the $7.5 million Center for Correct, Usable, Reliable, Auditable and Transparent Elections, or ACCURATE. Funded by the National Science Foundation, ACCURATE has a mission to evaluate flaws in e-voting technology and develop technical standards and e-voting systems that are tamper-resistant and easy to use. "California's top-to-bottom review was a landmark study of our electronic voting systems, and elections officials nationwide are paying close attention," Wallach said. "We discovered serious and significant security flaws in every system we examined, and officials will either be making adjustments to how they conduct their elections or will move to different technologies such as optically scanned paper ballots that are much less vulnerable to fraud." |
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