BBV Folks: SERVE Security Analysis

[LoneStarLiberal]

Howdy!

A security analysis of the SERVE system is up and, as we might expect, damning in its revelation of the problems this system poses for accurate and auditable electronic voting.

<http://www.servesecurityreport.org/>

This report is a review and critique of computer and communication security issues in the SERVE voting system (Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment), an Internet-based voting system being built for the U.S. Department of Defense's FVAP (Federal Voting Assistance Program). The program's web site is http://www.serveusa.gov/. While the system is called an experiment, it is going to be used to count real votes in the upcoming general elections. The authors are members of SPRG (the Security Peer Review Group), a panel of experts in computerized election security that was assembled by FVAP to help evaluate SERVE. Our task was to identify potential vulnerabilities the system might have to various kinds of cyber-attack, to evaluate the degrees of risk they represent to the integrity of an election, and to make recommendations about how to mitigate or eliminate those risks.

The SERVE system is planned for deployment in the 2004 primary and general elections, and will allow the eligible voters first to register to vote in their home districts, and then to vote, entirely electronically via the Internet, from anywhere in the world. Besides being restricted to overseas voters and military personnel, SERVE is currently limited to people who vote in one of 50 counties in the seven states (Arkansas, Florida, Hawaii, North Carolina, South Carolina, Utah, and Washington) that are participating. The program is expected to handle up to 100,000 votes over the course of the year, including both the primaries and the general election. (By comparison, approximately 100 million votes were cast in the 2000 general election.) The eventual goal of SERVE is to support the entire population of eligible overseas citizens plus military and dependents. This population is estimated to number about 6 million, so the 2004 SERVE deployment must be judged as a prototype for a very large possible future system.