http://www.sunspot.net/news/local/bal-te.md.machine30jan30,0,4050694.story
Md. computer testers
cast a vote: Election boxes easy to mess with
In Annapolis, tales of
trickery, vote rigging
By
Stephanie Desmon, Sun Staff
January
30, 2004
For
a week, the computer whizzes laid abuse - both high- and low-tech - on the six
new briefcase-sized electronic voting machines sent over by the state.
One
guy picked the locks protecting the internal printers and memory cards. Another
figured out how to vote more than once - and get away with it. Still another
launched a dial-up attack, using his modem to
slither through an electronic hole in the State Board of Elections software.
Once inside, he could easily change vote
totals that come in on Election Day.
"My
guess is we've only scratched the surface," said Michael A. Wertheimer,
who spent 21 years as a cryptologic mathematician at
the National Security Agency.
He
is now a director at RABA Technologies in Columbia, the firm that the state
hired for about $75,000 to look at Maryland's new touch-screen voting machines
scheduled to be unveiled in nearly every precinct
in Maryland for the March 2 primary.
The
state has no choice but to use its $55 million worth of AccuVote-TS
machines made by Diebold Election Systems for the
primary. The old optical scanners are
gone.
Yesterday,
Wertheimer calmly presented his eight-member team's findings to committees in
the House and Senate, explaining the weaknesses they discovered and a
plan for how to plug many of the cracks, at least in
the short run.
Giddy geek speak
Yet
on a recent morning at his offices, Wertheimer's
computer programmers were practically giddy as they invented new ways to muck
up an election. Some were
simple - like the lock-picking or just yanking the
cords out of a machine's monitor, disabling it for the rest of the day.
Other
fiddling inspired round after round of excited geek speak, true gibberish to
the untrained ear, to explain a host of attacks that could be launched up close
or by modem.
One
thing was clear: There are many ways to fool with Diebold's
machines, some of which could lead to an Election Day disaster. At the same
time, some scenarios
were far-fetched and too difficult to pull off
undetected, team members acknowledged.
But
the fact that they could happen makes it impossible to have full confidence in
the system, they said.
In
the short term, they said, enough fixes can be done to ensure a secure election
in March. But much more will need to be done to see that future elections on
the
machines can also be relied upon.
Diebold officials say many of the problems that
were found have been fixed.
"They
threw out theoretical things that could happen," spokesman David Bear said
of the testing team. "But the polling places are much different."
The
team was asked to answer two major questions, Wertheimer said: Do the machines
count votes accurately? And do they need paper receipts?
If
left alone, Wertheimer said, the machines will count quite accurately - more so
than any past voting method.
But
he has made a good living off the fact that there are plenty of people out
there looking to wreak havoc when they can.
Web
sites abound with all kinds of speculation about how easily the voting machines
can be hacked into and outcomes manipulated.
Prominent
computer scientists have studied the Diebold code -
some of which was found unprotected on the Internet - and found hole after hole
in its security.
Theories
have run rampant as to how to best clean up what critics call a mess.
Paper receipts
Wertheimer
said he thinks there will be a need for some type of paper receipt, what some
call a voter-verified paper trail - basically a printout of each vote as it is
cast for the voter to check before leaving the
polling place. Without a paper ballot, many say, a proper recount is
impossible.
Wertheimer
said it would take nearly a complete rewrite of the computer code to fix the
machines' flaws.
"For
a guy who just wants the vote to be accurate, I'd rather dumb down the software
and add receipts," he said.
Diebold "basically had no interest in
putting actual security in this system," said Paul Franceus,
one of the consultants. "It's not like they did it wrong. It's like they
didn't bother."
Mark
McLarnon had something up his sleeve as he approached
one of the voting machines. A close look revealed the cord of a portable
keyboard. He had learned
that he could quickly pick a lock on the side of the
machine, plug in his keyboard and wreak havoc on the results stored inside -
all while likely going undetected by
poll judges.
Using
a low-tech solution, such as tape that reveals tampering, could keep people
like McLarnon at bay, at least as a temporary fix,
the consultants said.
Low-tech
hacking is also a possibility, though.
Someone
bent on causing trouble could call a polling place and tell workers that the
state's modem is down and results should be called in on a new phone number.
Then
the troublemaker could simply change the results before sending them onto the
state.
While
results can now be encrypted - after criticism that they weren't being -
something called authentication is missing. Authentication tells the main
computer that
the person sending in results is the one who is
actually permitted to do so.
Sneaking in, via modem
Meanwhile,
William A. Arbaugh, an assistant computer science
professor at the University of Maryland, College Park and part of the team,
easily sneaked his way
into the state's computers by way of his modem. Once
in, he had access to change votes from actual precincts - because he knew how
to exploit holes in the
Microsoft software.
Those
holes should have been patched through regular updates sent to customers,
patches that haven't been installed on the elections equipment since November.
"There's
no security that's going to be 100 percent effective. But the level of effort
[needed to get into the system] was pretty low," Arbaugh
said. "A high school kid
could do this. Right now, the bar is maybe 8th grade.
You want to raise the bar to a well-funded adversary."
"Every
system is vulnerable somehow," said Karl Aro,
director of the state's Department of Legislative Services, who commissioned
the study for the legislature.
"The
system's not bad but it needs some work."
No
system is completely secure. In fact, the more elections the state holds, the
more opportunities there will be for hackers to see how it works and launch new
attacks, experts said.
"If
you had the time and the money, the sky's the limit on what you could do to
make a secure system," McLarnon said.
"You
just need to raise the level of effort needed to exploit it so it's not
feasible to do," said fellow consultant John Ormonde.
Copyright
© 2004, The Baltimore Sun
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