Title : Internet Voting: A Requiem for the Dream

Author : kerrnel

==Phrack Inc.== Volume 0x0f, Issue 0x45, Phile #0x0b of 0x10 |=-----------------------------------------------------------------------=| |=-------------=[ Internet Voting: A Requiem for the Dream ]=------------=| |=-----------------------------------------------------------------------=| |=------------------------------=[ kerrnel ]=----------------------------=| |=------------------------=[ phrack@kerrnel.com ]=-----------------------=| |=-----------------------------------------------------------------------=| A! Fredome is a noble thing Fredome mays man to haiff liking. Fredome all solace to man giffis, He levys at es that frely levys. A noble hart may haiff nane es Na ellys nocht that may him ples Gyff fredome failyhe, for fre liking Is yharnyt our all other thing. Na he that ay has levyt fre May nocht knaw weill the propyrte The angyr na the wrechyt dome That is couplyt to foule thyrldome, Bot gyff he had assayit it. - John Barbour, Brus Book I [26] --[ Table of contents 1 - A Backstory 2 - Why Do People Want Internet Voting 3 - The Evolution of Counting Votes 4 - Where is Internet Voting Piloted and Used 5 - Other Problems of Being On the Internet 6 - End-to-End Verifiable Internet Voting Schemes 7 - Push Back 8 - But We Use The Internet for [Foo] 9 - Imagining a More Secure Internet Voting System 10 - Conclusion 11 - Acknowledgements 12 - References --[ 1 - A Backstory It's June of 2024 and a group of wealthy and powerful men are sitting in a lounge room tucked away in the San Bernardino mountains, 80 miles east of Los Angeles. Thick and acrid cigar smoke fills the room. But sickening to me is the horrible stench of an entire nation's leadership being robbed. The men chat and haggle over what candidate will be elected president, senator, and so on. The mess here in the U.S. was kickstarted 24 years ago in the 2000 election of Bush v. Gore. It took over a month to declare a winner because of a dispute over vote counting in Florida. George Bush eventually won Florida by 537 votes, or 0.009% [1]. There was a tremendous amount of controversy over confusing ballots, errors with punch cards, and recount anomalies. In the aftermath, well meaning people called on computers to solve the United State's voting issues. After all, computers have simplified all other matters of life. But these people acted in a bit of arrogance; they didn't understand the technology. They banked with the computer, chatted with the computer, shopped with the computer, so surely it could be trusted for voting as well. But they didn't understand the depths of computer security problems, or why voting is fundamentally different than all the other aforementioned tasks. Security experts, almost universally against electronic voting, were dismissed as paranoid. In response to public demand, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act that sought to replace punchcard and lever voting machines [38]. And thus it is that our elections are now decided by the whim of powerful groups controlling the elections servers. This paper will dissect the problems that plagued internet voting from the very beginning. --[ 2 - Why Do People Want Internet Voting Before taking any serious examination of the flaws inherent in internet voting, the question must be asked, why do people want internet voting? The answer is: 1) civic engagement, 2) money, 3) want of power, and 4) technophilia. Some activists believe internet voting will increase voter turnout and thus cause higher civic engagement. That leads to the question, "Does internet voting significantly increase turnout?" In 2002 some local elections in the UK used an internet voting pilot, which lead to a 3.5% increase in voter participation [6]. It is, however, impossible to prove that this was because of internet voting [6]. Even if the increase in voter participation was 50%, increasing voter participation at the expense of having trustworthy elections is not a wise scheme. In the United States anyone can vote by mail, by sending in a form and mailing back a ballot that is sent to them. If participating in democracy is not important enough for someone to mail a piece of paper, should we really be bending over backwards to extend democracy to them? Money is an inherent problem in online voting because there is a lot of money to be made in voting systems. In the United States, open source solutions are often not adopted by the government. If Internet voting was ever seriously put in legislation here, companies would spew all sorts of exaggerations about the security of their systems to receive lucrative contracts to develop the system. Also, in the case of electronic voting machines, the companies long lobbied to keep their source code a proprietary secret. That we entrusted the integrity of our democracy to it was irrelevant to their patent attorneys [7]. There is also an argument that internet voting will save money on the cost of running elections. While it might, it's not clear that the cost of maintaining and developing the technology is actually cheaper than using paper ballots. More importantly, the purpose of an election is not to do it as cheaply as possible, but to have reliable results. It makes no sense to undermine elections to save money. Why those seeking power want in on internet voting is a longstanding issue. Boss Tweed, the corrupt New York City politician estimated to have stolen from $1 billion to $8 billion in 2010 dollars [8], said, "As long as I get to count the votes, what are you going to do about it?" [35]. Controlling the elections officials counting the votes was (and still is) one of the simplest ways to rig an election. This fraud is committed on local scales, however, as in the United States it is thought to be relatively impractical to rig a federal election county by county. Of course, it could happen in the U.S., and certainly it has happened in other countries. Consider, the 2011 election in Russia, which was reported to have numerous and severe irregularities on a national level [39]. In Ghana as well there were complaints of widespread fraud designed to rig their 2012 election [40]. Even in countries where this is possible to achieve, it takes a lot of coordination and work to pull off, requiring loyal political machines (or serious threat of violence). Internet voting, however, makes the fraud much easier to commit as it is possible to attack single points of failure -- a central counting server, or a piece of software running on numerous precinct servers. Who wouldn't want to control the software tallying the votes? At worst an entire country's results could be manipulated, and even if each region or district had their own system, groups could have a lot of influence controlling a regional election. Finally, technophiles can be a driving factor behind internet voting. These are people who just love having new technology for the sake of having new technology. In fact, I myself am guilty of loving the latest and greatest products. But in some cases, such as internet voting, we ought to be careful to make sure that technology is really improving the situation. So to the technophiles, even though I know they mean well, I ask them to please be restrained and think about the consequences of internet voting before we jump out of our seats for it. --[ 3 - The Evolution of Counting Votes Before the American Revolution, voting was generally conducted by voters calling out their votes which a clerk recorded next to their name [2]. This made verification of vote counts very easy, but obviously introduced a lot of opportunity for retaliation, vote buying, etc. By the time of the American Revolution the Americans and French were exploring the use of the secret ballot. The French constitution in 1795 mandated, "all elections are carried on by secret ballot" [2]. Of course as voting by ballot began to catch on, so did ballot stuffing. In 1856 a vigilance committee in San Francisco found a ballot box with a false bottom trap that stored ballots. It would look empty upon inspection before voting, and after the polls closed, the other ballots could be secretly mixed in. Some of the first technology to combat these tricks was quite simple: in 1858 Alan Cummings and Samuel Jollie both patented transparent ballot boxes. The design was quite simple: a glass globe in a wooden frame so that the ballots were always plainly in view from the start of voting to the moment of tabulation. This same principal is still used in many countries, although plastics have generally replaced glass [41]. Twenty years before the advent of the glass ballot boxes, the Peoples' Charter of 1838 in Britain had already described a voting machine. I strongly encourage the reader to have a look themselves at the image in [42], but in it a brass ball was dropped into a hole, corresponding to a candidate, which registered a vote on a dial. In 1892 the Myers Automatic Voting Booth was first introduced in the United States [43]. According to Douglas W. Jones of the University of Iowa, in the 1890s these machines were on the cutting edge of technology, with a tremendous number of moving parts. These machines did not provide a voting record for each voter, but simply had a counter behind each candidate which displayed their total number of votes. Electoral fraud was of course already a big problem with these mechanisms, and isn't a new concern with internet voting; my concern is just the extent of it. In 1934 Joseph P. Harris published his report on voting fraud in the United States [44]. He summarized types of fraud as such: Registration frauds - Register dead, non-existent voters, etc. Votes are then cast under the fake voters' names on election day. Repeating - Persons go from precinct to precinct voting under the names of these bogus voters, or even under the names of real voters. Ballot box stuffing - Officers overseeing the election will stuff ballots into the box. To avoid obvious counting issues, they will check off the name of a no-show voter for each fraudulent ballot inserted. Chain ballots - A marked official ballot is given to a voter in the morning. The voter is to deposit the market ballot and return the blank ballot given to them at the polling station. They are paid once the blank ballot is returned. This process continues all day. Harris notes a lack of evidence that this was a common practice. Assistance to voters - Voters may ask for assistance while casting their ballot. This is an easy way to break voter secrecy and ensure people are voting "the right way." They may ask for assistance willingly, or they may be intimidated into doing so. Intimidation and violence - Chicago, IL is a notoriously corrupt city. Harris noted whole sections of the city being terrorized by "the gun play of gangsters." Kidnapping had even been used to remove determined poll watchers. Altering ballots - If a voter fails to vote for all candidates, an election officer can simply add marks for their preferred candidate. Likewise excess marks can be added to disqualify a ballot voting for unfavored candidates. Substitution of ballots - Legitimate ballots may be discarded, and other ballots substituted for them. False count and false returns - It's well understood that it's much easier to simply rig the counting of votes than to alter ballots. In some cases ballots are not counted at all, and results are simply fabricated. Votes can also be read and/or recorded incorrectly by various precinct workers. Altering returns - The precinct returns can be altered by officials in the election office. Specific to lever voting machines one reported form of fraud is to break the teeth of the gear for a specific candidate's counting mechanism. This means that once during a cycle of the gear, a vote for that candidate is not registered. In Philadelphia in 1978, there was an election to determine if the mayor would be allowed to run for an additional term, as he faced a term limit. During the elections, the machines failed, curiously at high rates in districts that strongly opposed the mayor. Unfortunately, a suitable report of why the machines failed was never produced [2]. The next major technology change in voting came with the advent of the punchcard. Punchcards themselves are just what they sound like -- cards with perforated dimples that can be punched out to vote for a candidate. However, as was seen in the 2000 United States presidential election, they are susceptible to chads that are not not fully pushed out, creating controversy over how to count those. Around the same time, optical scanning machines rose to popularity. With these machines, which many of us have used for exams in our school days, the voter bubbles in their choice with a pencil or pen. The next piece of voting technology, which moved closer yet to internet voting, was the direct recording electronic voting machine, or DRE. These are computers in which people place their votes, which are then electronically tabulated. These machines are certainly more efficient than paper ballot counting, but are riddled with grave security issues [47]. I would love to explore those issues further, however, the focus of this paper is on internet voting. --[ 4 - Where is Internet Voting Piloted and Used Now that we understand why people want internet voting, and the history of voting technology leading to this point, for this paper it's important that we understand where internet voting is being used already, and what we know about these systems. I begin with an example of Washington D.C. because it is a rare case where the public was allowed to fully penetration test the system in a mock election. In 2010 Washington D.C. embarked on a pilot project to allow voters to participate in local elections through an online voting system. In September 2010, before collecting real votes, the Board of Elections conducted a pilot test allowing any member of the general public to vote and test the security of the system. Ultimately an attack by a team of researchers from the University of Michigan caused them to cancel the online voting initiative. The researchers were able to seize control of the servers, unmask secret ballots, and alter the final election results. The following information is a summary of what the Michigan team found ( please see [9] for a copy of their paper). The system itself used a stack consisting of Ruby on Rails, Apache, and MySQL. A front end web server receives HTTPS requests from the voters and then reverse-proxies them to the application server which hosts the software and stores the ballots. Multiple firewalls work to complicate attacks by blocking outbound TCP connections. The University of Michigan researchers noted that the intrusion detection system in front of the web server failed to decrypt the HTTPS connections carrying their attack. To login to the system the voter needs to use a voter ID number, registered name, residence ZIP code, and 16-character hexadecimal PIN. These credentials were sent out to voters in the mail. The ballots themselves are PDF files, filled out by the user with a PDF reader, and then uploaded to the server. To safeguard ballot secrecy, they are encrypted with a public key issued by elections officials. When the election ends they are transfered from the server to an offline machine, holding the private key, where they are decrypted and counted. Think about that -- they go through the trouble of keeping the ballot counting machine offline but allow arbitrary PDF files to be opened on it. :> Here are a few of the attacks that the Michigan team found. They stole the public key, which despite the term public key should actually be kept secret because it allows the application server to encrypt arbitrary ballots to substitute real ballots. Once they stole the key, they indeed used it to replace all of the previously cast ballots with forged ballots that voted a ticket of their choosing. They then replaced the ballot processing function with a modified function that would replace each voted ballot with their forged ballot. This also broke the secret ballot concept, as they used the new ballot processing function to track each voter. And, an unencrypted copy of each ballot was stored in /tmp by the PaperClip Rails plugin before encryption, so they could correlate the file time to the logs and then match past ballots to voters. The database credentials were located in the bash history file. A 937 page PDF file containing all of the voters login credentials was even located on the server, sitting in /tmp. And these were the credentials for the REAL election, not merely the pilot test. Had the real election not been canceled they could have used those to vote as actual citizens. Of course once finished they cleaned up the logs and removed all of their files from the application server's directories. To mark their territory after completely infiltrating the online voting system, they programmed the confirmation page to play the University of Michigan fight song when each user cast a ballot. Despite their musical calling card, it took officials in D.C. 36 hours to detect the attack and stop the pilot (another test user asked on a mailing list what song is played for a successful vote, raising their suspicions). There are many other examples of internet voting in use. These are given as examples of countries using internet voting and not necessarily examples of it being broken, but I do take the liberty of pointing out concerns that I may have. Canada. Although not used in federal elections, there are municipalities in Canada that allow internet voting. A demo of the Intelivote System is available at [45], however it had known hiccups in recent elections. In 2010 the system was being used across Ontario and it crashed late in the election [46]. The president of Intelivote Systems Inc. claimed it was because of unexpectedly high user demand, combined with a hardware failure. The company claimed "the integrity of the vote activity was not compromised and (Intelivote) is confident in the official election results" [46]. Very troubling, however, is that the company, in the statement I found, did not report having any outside parties evaluate the system to verify the integrity. Any company would certainly have financial incentive to cover up a hacked election, although I have no evidence to suggest InteliVote did any such thing. I simply raise the point. A more reasonable, and less accusatory scenario, is that they themselves may not have realized if they were hacked, or not have gone to enough length to find out. The fact that these incentives exist mean it is critical any internet voting system is heavily audited by independent agencies. New Jersey. On October 29th, 2012 Super-Storm Sandy battered the east coast of the United States, with New Jersey being particularly hard hit. The 2012 United States presidential election was held just a week later, and many displaced residents needed a way to vote. The governor ordered displaced citizens be allowed to vote by e-mail or fax [17][18]. Not only does this break ballot secrecy -- your email address being tied to your ballot -- but your ballot can be compromised with hacking techniques from the early days of Phrack, rather than advanced attacks. Although I have yet to see a detailed analysis of the results of the e-mail voting in New Jersey, I have found reports of at least a few issues [36]. Voters voting by e-mail are required to mail in a paper copy of their ballot, however several county clerks, and the executive director of the New Jersey Democratic Party, did not know this. Most likely thousands of voters did not know either. The requirement of mailing a separate paper ballot always raises the question that I don't understand: why bother? If they actually count all of the paper ballots that each person had to mail, the e-mail voting was just a nice song and dance and actually did not make anything more convenient or cheaper. If they do not verify all the paper ballots, there was no point in sending one, and then the results are not trustworthy. This leaves a choice between convenient or trustworthy, and in an election we should always go for the trustworthy option (paper ballots). Arizona. The 2000 Arizona Democratic Party presidential primary was the first major election held over the internet [19]. For the non-Americans out there (most of the world), the political parties in America have many candidates who want to run for president under the party's name, and thus they hold a primary election to pick their candidate. The private company, Election.com, hired to run the election reported that there was no hacking. This was a groundbreaking precedent for a major public election to include internet voting. United States. The United States allows deployed service members of the military to vote online. Estonia. The first country to use internet voting on a national basis was Estonia in 2005. Estonians have a national ID which contains an embedded digital certificate, which combined with an individual's PIN, can be used to uniquely identify that individual. An individual needs a $7 smart card reader, which will scan their digital certificate. The voting website can then use this, combined with the PIN, to authenticate the individual voting [20]. According to the PDF in [20] the ballots are secured and kept secret through this process: "A double-envelope scheme used for postal voting in some countries guarantees the secrecy of the vote. The voter's choice is encrypted by the voting application (i.e. voter seals the choice into an inner blank envelope) and then signs it digitally (i.e. puts the inner envelope into the outer one and writes his or her name and address on it). The signed and encrypted votes (outer envelopes) are collected to the central site for checking and ensuring that only one vote per voter is counted. Before counting, digital signatures with personal data (outer envelopes) are removed and anonymous encrypted votes (inner envelopes) are entered into the ballot box for counting. The scheme uses public key cryptography" So what do I think of this implementation of internet voting? A few thoughts. First off, Estonia is rare in that all of its citizens have a national ID card equipped with a smart chip inside. Even then a team of observers from OSCE/ODIHR (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe/Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights) found major security issues with the 2007 election [2]. Among the issues, the project manager was able to push changes to the voting software at will, meaning a version modified by insiders could easily be put onto the server. Furthermore, a code review report was never produced, and there is no policy in place dictating when internet votes would be invalidated. I cannot stress this point enough, as it applies to all countries: most internet voting advocates say, "Don't worry, if there was fraud we could always invalidate the internet votes." But nobody smart enough to hack a country's election will commit fraud in such an obvious way that people will know to invalidate the votes. Rather they would generate results that were statistically likely to happen and then hide all traces of their activities. Austria. In 2009, Austria used internet voting for the Federation of Students' student union election according to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) [48]. Although Austria does not allow for the use of internet voting in parliamentary elections, student union elections in Austra are regulated by law, and were allowed to use internet voting. Scytl, a European company, was selected as the software provider for the election. For the election Austria used a national ID card, which had two distinct PIN numbers that a voter had to use during the voting process. They also needed a card reader for the national ID card. Finland. Per the same EAC report, Finland allowed internet voting for municipal elections in 2008 [48]. In Finland, kiosks at polling places were used to access the internet voting application, rather than allowing users to vote at home. Votes were encrypted and digitally signed by the kiosk before transmission to the server. This election wound up having a bug causing certain votes not to be counted, and thus had to be redone anywhere where internet voting was used. As a result, they scrubbed the pilot. As a note, the Finnish chose to use kiosks at the polling place because they felt voting at home risked ballot secrecy and allowed the bribery and intimidation of voters. France. The EAC discussed internet voting being used in France dating back to 2001 [49]. In 2001, Voisins-le-Bretonneux conducted an internet voting pilot that used kiosks at the polling place like the Finnish did. This was for municipal elections only. In 2009 the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs setup internet voting for French citizens living overseas. It was designed to make it easier for overseas voters to vote, and 310,000 French citizens used it. Scytl provided the technology along with Atos Origin. The report says Opida, a security consulting company, audited the election. Strangely I cannot find the existence of a company called Opida, however there is a security consulting firm called Oppida located in France so I assume this is the company in question [49]. Switzerland. In Switzerland, three of the 26 Swiss cantons have internet voting as an option: Geneva, Neuchatel, and Zurich [49]. Since the three all use different systems, I want to focus on Geneva's system. Geneva's government owns and runs the system itself. Voters received a Voter Card in the mail, which had the information needed to vote by internet, mail, or in person. The voter used the information from this card to login to the online voting system. They then selected choices on a ballot, and saw a confirmation screen displaying all of their choices before casting the ballot. Lastly, the voter needed to use a pin code located on the Voter Card to cast the ballot. Interestingly the Geneva state council enforced the following 11 requirements for the election (taken verbatim from [49]): 1) Votes cannot be intercepted nor modified 2) Votes cannot be known before the ballot reading 3) Only registered voters will be able to vote 4) Each voter will have one and only one vote 5) Vote secrecy is guaranteed 6) The voting application will resist any DoS attack 7) Voters will be protected against identity theft 8) Number of cast votes = number of received ballots 9) It will be possible to prove that citizen X voted 10) The system will not accept votes outside the ballot opening period 11) The system will be auditable I find these requirements curious, as in theory it's not possible to meet them in a computerized system. The issue is the use of terminology such as "cannot" and "prove." For example, I assume where it says "votes cannot be intercepted nor modified," SSL is used to encrypt the web traffic. But of course SSL can be attacked, and thus votes can be intercepted or modified. The Swiss do use one really cool piece of technology in their voting technology: quantum encryption [24][54]. The details of quantum encryption are outside the scope of this article, but it uses photons of light to send encrypted messages. It is based on the fact that the quantum state of a particle cannot be observed without altering it permanently, so eavesdroppers cannot read the photons without destroying the information encoded in them. The Swiss use the quantum encryption technology to transfer vote counts over fiber optic cable from a vote counting station in the city, to a government data center in the suburbs of Geneva. United Kingdom. According to the EAC report [48], the UK has conducted over thirty internet voting pilots for local elections between 2002 and 2007. In a 2002 pilot, nine locations enabled internet voting pilots. The Liverpool pilot was particularly interesting in that voters could vote via SMS, as well as from their home computers. Liverpool's was run by Election.com, the same company that ran Arizona's Democratic Primary in 2000. In Liverpool, electors were mailed an information sheet with PINs, passwords, candidate codes, the web address and instructions. Voters using the internet voting went to the web-site and entered the PIN and password specified in their information sheet. The voters then made their selections and voted after confirming their choices. The vote was then transmitted over the internet to Election.com's servers, where it was tallied. Voters using SMS to vote sent a text message that was formatted as such: <PIN> <PASSWORD> <CANDIDATE NUMBER> They then sent the message to a phone number specified in their information sheet. Apparently each ward used a different phone number. The voter then receives a confirmation text message, and the vote was then sent to the same Election.com server as the internet votes. I have a lot of concerns about voting via SMS. I am not very knowledgeable with SMS protocols, but the information I have read indicates SMS messages are encrypted with the broken A5 cypher and only between the phone and the cell tower [50]. Furthermore, I know from firsthand experience how many times I've tried to send a text and it doesn't show up until hours or days later. Not a system I want casting my vote. In Liverpool, for the 2002 pilot, the EAC reported that 59.4% of voters voted in person, or by mail, 16.4% voted by internet, 17.4% by telephone, and 6.7% by text message. State of New South Wales. Can't forget the Aussies out there! The last example I will pull from the EAC report [48] is the State of New South Wales which allowed voting from home by internet and telephone in their 2011 state election. They called the system iVote. It was designed for voters with disabilities (including legal blindness), illiterate voters, and voters traveling or living 20km or more from their polling place. Everyone Counts [51] was responsible for the core technology behind the voting system. Voters registered to use the iVote system over the internet or by calling an iVote operator. When they registered, voters specified a six digit PIN. The voter then received an eight digit iVote number (which was sent by email, mail, telephone, or text). In that trial, 2,259 voters voted by phone and 44,605 voters voted by internet. The government of New South Wales produced a post election report on the election [52]. They commissioned Pricewaterhouse Coopers (PwC), one of the "big four" accounting firms, to generate the report. The report at [52] claims they found that no tampering had occurred with the ballots. However they say only that this information was gleaned from "cryptographic integrity checks," which is not specific enough for me to draw any conclusions. Consider the Helios example, presented later in the paper, as proof that ensuring that nothing was tampered with on the server side as little evidence that the election was not rigged. In the report they note that they tested the iVote system and made sure the test results recorded matched the test votes cast for internet and phone voting. However, a team of researchers at Princeton University wrote malware for a Diebold Accuvote-TS machine which disabled itself during test mode, and then completely wiped itself after the election leaving no traces [53]. The same type of attack could work against an online voting system such as iVote, although of course there is no evidence is has been done... yet. The PwC report also contains a list of incidents in Appenix C [52]. The problems ranged from relatively harmless (voters were sent the wrong iVote numbers and then given the correct iVote numbers and asked to vote again) to grave. On March 23, 2011 there was an 8 minute outage of the iVote system between 10:24 AM and 10:33 AM for which no cause was ever identified. Not every outage in a system is a sign of foul play but in a system which runs a state's election, I would like better answers than "undetermined cause." --[ 5 - Other Problems of Being On the Internet Cyber warfare has become big business. For example, on March 20, 2013, South Korean TV networks and banks were crippled in a cyber attack that was ultimately blamed on North Korea [11]. The U.S. government seems paranoid about cyberattacks originating in Iran and China [29]. While it is difficult to know how much truth there is to individual claims about who is attacking whom, I think we can all agree that there are certainly aggressive attacks occurring between countries. If a national election was being conducted by internet voting, a foreign country would have a high degree of incentive and desire to disrupt or control the election. Another speculative but real threat would be a phishing and/or misinformation attack. For example, in 2012, in Madison, Wisconsin, a U.S. city, the Republican party sent a mailing to heavily democratic areas giving them incorrect registration instructions [30]. It's not clear if this was deliberate or an honest mistake, but it is suspicious, and you could imagine sending e-mails to people that would cause them to go to the wrong web-site to vote. It could be an identical look alike to the real election web-site and either throw their vote way, or even steal their credentials and use them at the real voting web-site. This is speculative and it's doubtful an entire election could be rigged this way, but such tricks could deprive a certain percentage of voters of their voting rights, and could even tip the balance in an extremely tight race. It would also be possible to harvest credentials in the weeks before an election by sending e-mails instructing voters to "enter their credentials to verify their online voting account." Those credentials could then be used to vote on election day. Like the misinformation attack, this would have limited impact but could still affect a tight election and cause confusion amongst the general population. Another attack that has been used in real life against voting systems is the browser rootkit attack, whereby one secretly installs a browser extension that modifies the behavior of webpages. The Helios voting system [32] is an open source internet voting system that is designed to allow users to vote a secret ballot but still verify that the ballot was received and tallied correctly (source code available at [33]). In other words, it is a mathematically and cryptographically correct model of internet voting. Helios uses client side JavaScript extensively, to store the ballot itself and the Exponential ElGamal encryption used [34] is implemented in JavaScript. For some of the computationally intensive crypto procedures are implemented in Java, requiring the JVM to be installed on the web browser. JavaScript and JVM... can one ask for a better attack vector? :> In the Helios system, candidates are allowed to provide a PDF file (another fantastic attack vector) that explains their candidacy for voters to view. So the scheme is probably clear at this point: exploit a PDF vulnerability to install a malicious browser rootkit as an extension (they picked Firefox but claim IE would have been just as easy to attack), which is actually injected into an already installed extension so the user does not notice a new extension being installed. The browser rootkit spies on the user's web traffic, and swings into action whenever the user visits the voting web-site. At that point it has full control over what the clients does and sees on their end of the voting system. Researchers Saghar Estehghari and Yvo Desmedt implemented this attack against Helios. Their complete report is available at [31]. In their case they have Alice running against Bart Preneel, and they want Alice to win, so she uploads the rootkitted PDF. In this attack, only a candidate or admin could carry it out because voters cannot upload their own PDFs to the server. With the rootkit installed, when a voter votes for Bart, they change the vote to Alice. But they modify the confirmation page and plaintext views of the ballot to show that Bart was voted for, fooling the voter. The last issue is if the voter decides to verify the ballot, the system will show the "Encryption doesn't match" message as the result. They fixed this by changing the verification function to always output "Encryption is verified," under all circumstances. This attack could have been distributed through any means and attacked any system. The point is that as long as every home computer is a potential voting kiosk, it's not a problem if the election server proves too difficult to compromise. By hacking the users browser to change votes behind the scenes, the election can still be manipulated silently. Even a properly designed voting system can be compromised because the voting kiosk is not secure. There exists another problem with the fact that every home computer is now potentially a voting kiosk. Vote rigging through bribes or intimidation will once again rise in popularity. This is currently hard to do because people vote with a secret ballot, in a private booth. No thug can pay them a bribe knowing that they actually voted for them, nor beat them knowing that they voted for the wrong person (except for the "voter assistance" ploy described earlier). With internet voting, you might simply watch them vote, or host a "community voting event" at your house, to shake everyone down. As a reminder, why focus our scrutiny solely on the potential for outsider attacks? As I quoted Boss Tweed earlier, as long as those in power control the insiders counting the votes, they can seldom be stopped. Most of us know the famous example from the movie "Office Space," where the company's software is programmed to siphon tiny fractions of every transaction into a bank account and it then goes horribly wrong. But it would not be hard at all for some of the programmers of the voting software to sneak in some code to alter the election (consider the Estonia incident where the project manager could push changes to the server at will). --[ 6 - End-to-End Verifiable Internet Voting Schemes A cryptographically verifiable voting scheme, Helios, has already been mentioned in this paper. These schemes try to compensate for the problems that come with voting over a network composed of untrusted and often compromised components. However, it was demonstrated that a browser rootkit successfully undermines the voting scheme. There are other systems which go a step farther by using specialized printers to produce physical, cryptographically signed, receipts. These schemes are closer to a DRE machine, since they require the voters to go to a voting location with specialized equipment, but I want to address the schemes because they could presumably be networked to the internet to facilitate in vote aggregation and counting, and because they use internet bulletin boards to post the proof that the ballots were correctly counted. One of the best known of these schemes is David Chaum's "Secret Ballot Receipts: True Voter-Verifiable Elections" scheme [60]. The detailed cryptography of the scheme is outside of the scope of this paper, but interested readers should read both Chaum's paper [60], and a vulnerability analysis of the scheme conducted by Chris Karlof et al. [61], which identifies key flaws. In Chaum's scheme, voters receive a physical receipt of their ballot, which consists of two separately laminated layers. Put together, the layers make up a human readable image of the ballot. But each individual half, alone, appears to be nothing but random black and white pixels. After the machine prints the receipt, the voter tells the machine which half they will keep as their proof (this must be done after the machine has printed the receipt), and shreds the other half at the polling location. Later, cryptographic material embedded in the layer can be used by election trustees to tabulate the ballot, and voters can verify that their vote was counted correctly by locating their receipt on the public bulletin board. I am not aware of any proofs that the cryptographic scheme used by Chaum is flawed, however as Karlof et al. point out, these voting schemes are implemented on systems with a very wide scope, and there are many opportunities for flaws in the systems themselves, as well as human error. The social engineering attacks they present are interesting. Ordinary citizens do not understand cryptography to enough depth to generally notice even a very minor alteration in the cryptographic protocol. For example, if the machine asks the voter which portion of the receipt the voter wishes to retain (top or bottom), before printing the signed receipt, the machine can construct the two receipts to decrypt to an arbitrary ballot of the attacker's choosing (see [61] for an explanation of why that is). This is exactly my problem with such schemes. As I explain in the conclusion, one of the central tenants of democratic elections is that ordinary citizens see and understand the voting process, and have faith in the results. Ordinary citizens, including myself, do not understand these schemes to the appropriate depth to monitor the election and have faith and understanding in the process. Worse yet, no matter how sound the math behind the crypto is, the implementation of the crypto primitives must be absolutely correct. A nation state could easily detect and take advantage of the most subtle statistical flaws in the pseudorandom number generation, for example (that is if they had not already backdoored the key generating hardware used in the election). Ordinary citizens can watch voters put their ballots into boxes and then later watch the ballots be removed and counted. Ordinary citizens can see someone take all the ballot boxes into a secret backroom and later emerge with them. Ordinary citizens, including myself, cannot look at a cryptographically signed receipt and say, "Ah, the random number generation is flawed!". Thus a complicated cryptographic scheme, not well understood by the general population, is not the way to have trust in democratic elections. --[ 7 - Push Back Despite the number of countries adopting internet voting pilots, there has also been backlash against electronic voting in general in certain countries. In 2007 the Dutch banned the use of their Nedap voting machines [58], citing the lack of a paper trail. In addition in 2009 Ireland abandoned their e-voting initiative citing high cost as well as a lack of trust in the computers' ability to securely tabulate an election [57]. I find Germany's 2009 ban of electronic voting machines the most interesting however, as many of the German Federal Constitutional Court's findings coincide with my criticisms of internet voting (note: Germany banned *electronic* voting machines, not internet voting, but it is still related). The German court found that the machines were unconstitutional because the average citizen could not be expected to understand what the machine was doing when it tabulated the results (it's a "black box"). In addition, they considered that in a traditional voting system manipulations and fraud are far more difficult to execute and carry a significant chance of detection. However, a bug or deliberate fraud inserted into voting software would be easy to place and difficult to detect [59]. --[ 8 - But We Use The Internet for [Foo] One of the common fallacies to support internet voting is that if the internet is used for other important activities, such as banking and commerce, why can't it be trusted for voting? The two main answers are that online banking is not secret, and that banking fraud can be papered over with money. Suppose I go online and send $1,000 to my landlord for rent. The landlord will see that I sent $1,000, I will see that my account had $1,000 deducted, and the bank will have records of these transactions. I can call the landlord and confirm that he received the money. If he lied and claimed he didn't, the bank would still have records of it and so I could prove that he was paid. If somehow the transaction went badly and the landlord was paid $2,000, I would see this on my statement and could demand the money back because my lease dictates the landlord is owed only $1,000. But with voting, because ballots are secret, this type of verification would never work. I know I sent a ballot, but I do not know that it was counted towards whomever I wanted to vote for. I don't even know that it was counted at all. If this was the landlord example, I would see that a mystery amount was deducted from my account, have no idea what my current balance is, and have no way of knowing that landlord received the money, with neither him nor the bank having records of it. The other issue is the notion of papering over fraud. When a business evaluates a piece of technology, the basic question is if the amount of money saved using the technology outweighs whatever the technology will cost. The increase in fraud caused by online banking is definitely a cost of online banking, but it saves banks and consumers so much time and money, that it makes sense to paper over the problem. That is, when money is stolen from people's accounts, the banks are willing to just put the money back in and take the loss, because they still save money. But this does not work with voting. You cannot paper over a stolen election -- the election is rigged and the entire country's confidence is ruined (if anybody even notices that there was fraud). In e-commerce it is not uncommon at all to allow a spouse or child to use your credentials to make a purchase. However, it is generally illegal to allow someone else to vote with your name and ballot. But with internet voting it is impossible to know when this is happening. Imagine a Silk Road [15] website being setup for the purpose of selling voting credentials in exchange for Bitcoins. --[ 9 - Imagining a More Secure Internet Voting System The book, Broken Ballots [2], mentions that in 1875 Henry Spratt of England was granted a U.S. patent on a voting machine. The patent, U.S. Patent 158,652, claims that it allows "balloting (that is, voting secretly) without the aid of balls, tickets, passes, letters, figures, official stamps, or ballot-boxes; second, absolute secrecy, it being impossible to discover for whom the voter has voted; third, while secrecy is obtained, all parties, pro and con, can be satisfied the voter has voted; fourth, at the close of the poll the result of the voting can be instantly made known; fifth, a complete check as to the numbers voted, preventing any tampering with the apparatus." This claim is noteworthy because it remains the central tenant that voting technology still tries to solve. Of course, we now know that even 140 some years later, we have not been able to solve this problem. Matt Bishop describes the properties academia would say an e-voting system must meet [56], and I've listed the ones I find relevant to this article: 1) The e-voting system must not be able to associate votes with a particular voter 2) The e-voting system must prevent a voter from casting more than a particular number of votes in a race, or one vote per ballot 3) The voter must be able to verify the votes on the ballot at any time until the vote is cast 4) The e-voting system must tally the votes accurately. Votes must not be intentionally or accidentally mis-recorded. 5) It must be possible to conduct an audit on the reported vote tally, using an out-of-band mechanism. A recount cannot be conducted by recounting votes on the server because a server with a bug will produce a bad recount as well. I would add a sixth requirement: 6) Trust. The general population must be able to trust that votes, or the count, was not modified at any point in the counting process. So the question is, could we design a system to meet all of these requirements? As we saw in the Helios example, there are certainly mathematical models that can do it. But our computers are so full of areas to exploit, it's not feasible to do given what we currently know about designing secure computer systems and I hope the examples I have provided have convinced you of this fact. --[ 10 - Conclusion This article has spent some time discussing internet voting in usage, as well as its technical shortcomings. But I would like to end on a brief discussion of the sociology behind democracy. I believe the following: 1. Internet voting is not compatible with democracy 2. No amount of technology can change this 3. Whom you voted for ought to be secret 4. Who voted should not be secret -- it should be known as widely as possible 5. And who counts the votes, and how, certainly ought not be secret As I mentioned before, in 1856 a vigilance committee in San Francisco first found a ballot box with a false bottom, allowing ballots to be hidden in it and then secretly mixed in with the real ballots before counting. Ever since people have been trying to counter voter fraud with technology [2]. Democracy is somewhat miraculous compared to previous forms of government in that power is transferred smoothly and without violence, even between opposing factions. This is because people accept that whomever receives the most votes has a legitimate claim to authority. If people do not believe that the votes are legitimate, then they do not believe that the ruler has legitimate authority, and thus social chaos could ensue. Further complicating the matter is that votes must be secret, or citizens can be coerced into voting for certain interests (or willingly bribed). Because I cannot look into a database and see that a vote from myself was recorded for candidate Bob in some election, I must inherently trust the ballot counting process. This means I trust that the organization tallying the votes (the government) successfully overcomes outside interests wanting to rig the outcome. For hundreds of years we have used paper ballots to tally our elections. Paper ballots are far from perfect, and indeed we have seen instances of fraud on local scales. However, paper ballots do not have a single failure point where an entire country's election could be so efficiently compromised, especially in countries not known for having systemic corruption. Precinct workers verify who is actually coming to vote and mark their name as having voted (in many towns the precinct workers will recognize many of the voters). The ballots are then counted by people, in front of other people, in each precinct. These results are then congregated by district, state, etc. It is a distributed, fault tolerant system, which relies on human beings faith in a process run by other humans that they can monitor and understand. With internet voting, a simple software bug could affect entire precincts, regions, or countries and be quite difficult to detect. A maliciously inserted bug, designed to manipulate an election, could slip through just as easily and have the same effects. It is very difficult for humans to know exactly what a computer is doing, especially when every computer on the internet is a potential voting kiosk. Thus internet voting is not a case of technology bringing democracy up to date. It is a case of technology undermining confidence in a process that must be trusted for elected governments to succeed. I'm one voter who is happy to keep casting paper ballots. --[ 11 - Acknowledgements Much thanks to Twiga for her time and priceless advice in shaping this paper. daw provided great insight and background reading on end-to-end verifiable internet voting. --[ 12 - References [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_ presidential_election_in_Florida,_2000 [2] Broken Ballots: Will Your Vote Count? Douglas W. Jones & Barbara Simons. 2012. 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