Election hacked, drunken robot elected to school board- not a joke

[Ichingcarpenter]

Security experts have warned that electronic voting systems are decades away from being secure, and to prove it a team from the University of Michigan successfully got the foul-mouthed, drunken Futurama robot Bender elected to head of a school board.

In 2010 the Washington DC election board announced it had set up an e-voting system for absentee ballots and was planning to use it in an election. However, to test the system, it invited the security community and members of the public to try and hack it three weeks before the election.


It will be decades before we have the technology to vote securely, Jefferson said, if indeed it is even possible. At stake is democracy itself, but politicians don't seem to understand the problems of electronic voting, and both Jefferson and Halderman expressed fears for the future if current systems become more popular.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/03/01/electronic_voting_hacked_bender/

http://www.pcworld.com/article/251187/hackers_elect_futuramas_bender_to_the_washington_dc_school_board.html

[Syrinx]

1. I was hoping it was Geoff Peterson

[jdadd]

2. My local School board needs someone like Bender....

[Fumesucker]

3. It would be an improvement here too I think... n/t

[fasttense]

4. If you still thought our election process was NOT rigged after Alvin Greene's win in South Carolina

in June 2010. Then this rigged election might prove it to you, but not likely.

When Alvin Greene won a 16-point victory over his seemingly much more qualified opponent, 64 year-old Vic Rawl, a former judge and legislator, then you had to know there is no longer any integrity in our elections. The voting process is just as corrupted as all our governmental processes. That's why RepubliCONS still think they can win.

[Stevepol]

28. Amen and Amen!!

I've moved beyond amazement in trying to understand how officials (and not all Repub either) continue to act as if e-voting is even remotely democratic or trustworthy.

When the vote is counted in total secrecy without verification it's impossible to have a democracy. I don't care how many people say otherwise.

[Bill_Kelleher]

44. repubs can be reduced to rubble

Internet Voting can Empower the 99%
Convenient voting allows more people to easily vote. That means more moderate in the middle folks, who are sick of partisanship. W/ such elections, grid lock in Congress will be broken, and the public interest will prevail.
Also, Internet voting can neutralize the power of Big Money in all US elections. Watch debates online or on TV, vote online. No time for commercials to corrupt voter opinion.
Read. Think. Reform!
William J. Kelleher, Ph.D.
Blog: http://tinyurl.com/IV4All
Twitter: wjkno1
Author of Internet Voting Now!

[MADem]

5. Hell, at least some decisions might get made!!! nt

[SomeGuyInEagan]

6. Imagine the ratings spike on local the cable access channel ...

... if Bender was sitting on your local school district board. I'd host watching parties.

[xchrom]

7. Du rec. Nt

[AsahinaKimi]

8. Rec

[flvegan]

9. It's like a small-market Bush headline.

[Suji to Seoul]

10. Bite my shiny metal ass, Meatbags!

[meow2u3]

11. I could just imagine Bender's victory speech

He'd tell the "losers" of the election: "Bite my shiny metal @$$."

[pscot]

12. This is the best part!

"According to the log files the team found, plenty of people were also busy trying to get into the system. They spotted attempts to get in from the Persian University, as well as India and China. Using their inside access, they blocked these attacks. Finally, they inserted the word "owned" onto the final signoff screen of the voting page, and set up the University of Michigan football fight song to play after 15 seconds.

It took two days before the authorities discovered they'd been pwned, and they were only alerted to that fact when another tester told them the system was secure, but that they should lose the music on the sign-off screen, as it was rather annoying."

[sce56]

21. +537

"they were only alerted to that fact when another tester told them the system was secure, but that they should lose the music on the sign-off screen, as it was rather annoying."

LOL

[Bill_Kelleher]

45. DC System Carelessly Constructed

One badly put together system doesn't say anything about Internet voting in general. See my other posts here.

[MustBeTheBooz]

13. Not good. Funny...but not good.

Our system for electing people, at all levels of government, is seriously screwed up, and it appears to be getting worse with each cycle. Discouraging, man.


Thanks for the knowledge IC. recced

MBTB

[paparush]

14. "It will be decades before we have the technology to vote securely..." Total BS!

We could (should) be voting securely, electronically, today using open standards, transparent data monitoring, and standardized voting machines.

It's the black box, no-you-can't-see-our-code, host it on our servers, patented, closed source, privatized voting that's standing in the way. That and crooked local officials who keep results in an Excel spreadsheet that they can change on a whim, leaving virtually no record of their misdeeds behind.

[RC]

18. NO, you vote on paper

Then you can use scanners.

If there is ANY question, then you count the paper by hand, in front of certified witness and the public.

Any computer can be programed for any output, regardless of input and hide/delete or fake any log files so the output looks legitimate. There is no way to make electronic voting secure if anyone involved is not honest.

[AllyCat]

19. Or we could count the votes in public at the school gymnasium or other large venue

That would also be secure and really wouldn't take that long.

[saras]

20. We should have ponies, too, and software as bug-free as TeX

Until there are as many citizens capable of competently evaluating the security of source code, as there are capable of seeing someone stuff ballots in a box, paper systems will have an unbeatable advantage. Because you have to check the code in every machine, right before every election, and then keep them in public view until the actual election is over.

I am in favor of posting vote results electronically, district by district, as fast as possible, so the entire process of votes building up to a majority is completely visible, in real time. But unless the machines are mechanical, with all moving parts visible, I don't trust machines to record votes accurately, ever. The payoff for cheating is simply too high, and the cost of getting caught too low. Just look at the history of perpetual motion to see how far inventors will go to sucker the willing.

Even so, there IS software more trustworthy than unsecured spreadsheets or Access databases, especially if there's also an external port for access to the machine. That just makes me feel REALLY cozy, like I want to hunker down with my laptop and elect everyone I REALLY want elected. Robots, mythological figures, adverbs, gerunds, and interstices.

A trustworthy voting machine would leave a permanent record of every internal state, which is why computers are stupid for the job. Do you really want to audit a code trace? You can't just arbitrarily trust hardware unless you've completely controlled access to it. At this point, you can't even really trust the innards of ICs unless you made them yourself from your own masks, as the military occasionally finds to their chagrin.

[tblue37]

27. I wish Anonymous hackers would use their skills to prove how unreliable

our electronic voting systems are.

With voter suppression laws and black-box voting, the Repubs could take a lot of close elections--as I am sure they have been doing for years.

The only reason I can see for Dems to ignore this problem is that some of the more powerful, long-term Dems must also benefit somehow from the system, perhaps in terms of preventing primary challengers--or at lower levels, perhaps in terms of monetary kickbacks from the companies that make or distributethe machines.

[saras]

32. Yep - I've seen a bunch of 70/30 elections suddenly change to 49/51 when the "votes" get counted

Ever wonder how a county can, with big businesses opening and closing, hiring or letting go hundreds of employees, and all this other population activity, can, election after election, come up within a few dozen votes of 50/50, even if one side is clearly unpopular?

[Dollface]

15. GO BLUE!

[iandhr]

16. Best Bender clip ever

[ThoughtCriminal]

17. We're Boned!

But at least it wasn't Flexo.

[Initech]

22. Bite my shiny metal ass!!!

[WhoIsNumberNone]

23. But he didn't vote though- Right?

The Republican plan is working.

[eppur_se_muova]

24. Bender is the Greatest !

We all agreed on that, right ?

[AverageJoe90]

25. As a fan of Futurama, all I can say is, LMFAO.

What's next? Philip J. Fry for President? With Turanga Leela as Secretary of State?(And Zoidberg as Vice President?) LOL. =D

[MACARD]

33. wow forget making his day you just made Zoidbergs millennium.

Zoidberg was dreaming big when he dreamed of being Vice President Agnew's third footstool

[Bill_Kelleher]

26. Spreading Irrational Hysteria

Tarvi Martens, who designed the Estonia Internet voting system, says it’s “more secure than Internet banking” http://t.co/Jh6Onyd
Natalie Tennant, sec of state for West Virginia says her Internet voting system worked w/o security or other problems for WV overseas military.
Its used in domestic elections in Norway, Switzerland, and India. France and Mexico City will use it this year for overseas voters.
Elections Canada, which administers that country’s federal elections, wants Internet voting for all its elections. Several Canadian cities have been doing it for years.
Privacy need not be a problem. One module takes the name and checks eligibility. A second module puts up the blank ballot, and saves the vote. They never connect. And the two modules can shuffle their data so no links can be found. (They didn’t do that in the DC system.)
Auditability is provided for by the module logs.
Coercion in mail-in voting districts has not been a problem. The penalties are a deterrent, and the crime is easy to prove. Who wants to risk several years in prison just to control one or two votes?
Paper security blankets only fool the naïve into thinking they have a secure and trust-worthy voting system. The entire history of voting fraud is based on paper ballots.

Halderman, et al are spreading irrational hysteria, by disregarding all the successes of Internet voting around the world. One hack of a carelessly constructed system does not damn all Internet voting.


William J. Kelleher, Ph.D.
Blog: http://tinyurl.com/IV4All
Twitter: wjkno1
Author of Internet Voting Now!

[AdHocSolver]

29. Your comment tells me that you have limited or no experience with real-world computer programming.

I have over twenty years of programming experience on several computer systems and with various applications.

It is safe to assert that there are no software systems of size that do not have numerous "bugs" in them ranging from annoying to serious.

It is safe to assert that a quarter to a half (or more) of the software systems that do get implemented are late and over budget, and many are second or even third attempts to implement. A large number of systems are so late or so over budget that they are scrapped.

The only way to prevent a system from being hacked is to never connect it to the Internet. The Defense Department has been hacked, and Microsoft has been hacked.

Have you ever heard of Anonymous?

Relying on bug-ridden hackable computer systems for voting accuracy and security is ludicrous.

Studies by computer experts of existing computer systems for voting have shown that they have numerous flaws and are easily "hacked" to change election results.

There is NO way to trust an election using a computer without an independently marked paper ballot than can be hand counted.

[Joseph8th]

31. Spot on. Basic principle of crypto: there is no such thing as perfect crypto.

I'm a math guy, myself... with a background in CS. Have to agree. There's no such thing as perfectly secure network, or perfect encryption. A determined hacker can always find a way.

Problem is we're not even allowed to know how determined a hacker needs to be. And when it's shown how little determination it really takes, over and over again, nothing happens except more of the machines are put in place.

So the Internet Voting Spammer can suck an egg. What's it going to take? Putting Bender in the White House?

[Bill_Kelleher]

41. Does Math Guy Believe Halloween Stories?

Doesn't anybody deal w/ facts around here? All over the world Internet voting systems are being used w/o security breaches that mar election integrity.
Zbig Brzezinski: “One major American vulnerability that is almost always overlooked is a [US] public that is highly ignorant about the world.”

http://theglobalist.com/storyid.aspx?StoryId=9548

[Bill_Kelleher]

40. Dude - respect FACTS

"Studies by computer experts of existing computer systems for voting have shown that they have numerous flaws and are easily "hacked" to change election results.'
There are NO such peered reviewed studies. I know, I wrote the book on it.

"There is NO way to trust an election using a computer without an independently marked paper ballot than can be hand counted."
False. Read the FACTS I gave you in my post.

Sounds like 25 years of closed mindedness to me
William J. Kelleher, Ph.D.
Blog: http://tinyurl.com/IV4All
Twitter: wjkno1
Author of Internet Voting Now!

[AdHocSolver]

47. You provided NO facts, only assertions by people who are NOT computer savvy.

Moreover, the assertions of security in Internet voting that you cited are made by people with a vested interest that all is well with computer voting, since they are the people who promoted and implemented it.

There are thousands of computer viruses, worms, trojans, spybots, and malware floating around the Internet. To imply that people who vote on the Internet would not be affected in large numbers is totally naive.

To imply that vote counting computers would not get infected and be compromised is highly misleading.

And that doesn't even account for the failures, lost vote counts, and other glitches that occurred with computer voting machines that did not involve using the Internet.

For several years, these issues with computer voting were published in magazine and newspaper articles as well as numerous web sites including DU. Next time you write a treatise on a subject, research both sides of the issue before publishing it.

[xtraxritical]

39. With so many people out of work there can be no shortage of competent poll watchers.

A lot cheaper than electronic, or scanning and more reliable/auditable. Don't trust programmers, they can be Repukes too!

[Bill_Kelleher]

42. Internet Voting can Empower the 99%

Internet Voting can Empower the 99%
Convenient voting allows more people to easily vote. That means more moderate in the middle folks, who are sick of partisanship. W/ such elections, grid lock in Congress will be broken, and the public interest will prevail.
Also, Internet voting can neutralize the power of Big Money in all US elections. Watch debates online or on TV, vote online. No time for commercials to corrupt voter opinion.
Read. Think. Reform!

[Renew Deal]

30. Congrats to Bender!

[Devil_Fish]

34. Bender for PREZ!!!!!

And when it happens, we will just have to replay them saying that the machines are 100% secure over and over.

[boppers]

35. Idiots used Rails.

If you are using a "framework", you've already damaged your security in the name of convenience.

[Fearless]

36. I can solve this one.. Antiquing? n/t

[DFW]

37. I heard this ten years ago from someone who knows how do this

My brother does super high tech stuff for DARPA.

Almost ten years ago, after the election of 2002, he told me just give him a laptop and a cell phone,
and he'll make any electronic voting machine give you any result you want it to.

In the last ten years, cell phones and laptops have gotten a LOT more sophisticated.

The voting machines have not.

[Bill_Kelleher]

43. Scary Stories are for Kids

How does your mind deal w/ the facts of Internet voting success all over the world- including West Virginia?
William J. Kelleher, Ph.D.
Blog: http://tinyurl.com/IV4All
Twitter: wjkno1
Author of Internet Voting Now!

[DFW]

46. My "kid" brother has made half of the Defense Department's computers run for the past 15+ years

My mind deals with it just fine. Maybe your security clearance at DARPA is higher than his, but I doubt it.

Another guy, who knows more about the DoD than you ever will, lost his Georgia Senate seat in 2002
while favored in every poll there was. Practically every Republican "upset victory" in those midterms
happened where a Diebold or ESS machine was doing the tallying. Even the company making the
voting machine admitted a "glitch" in 2004 when their voting machine in Ohio--the ONLY one to be forensically
examined independently in Ohio--gave Bush 3000 votes in a precinct with 600 registered voters. Their willingness
to admit a glitch in the one machine that was scrutinized still did not lead them to allow examination of their
other machines, which, according to them, all worked glitch-free. If you believe that one, then you're the kid,
and you can tell the tooth fairy hi from all of us.

[ghjtydger]

38. Spam deleted by NRaleighLiberal (MIR Team)