Essay About Insider Privileges And Voting System

Theatre in Germany
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Abstract
With significant U.S. federal funds now available to replace outdated punch-card and mechanical
voting systems, municipalities and states throughout the U.S. are adopting paperless electronic voting
systems from a number of different vendors. We present a security analysis of the source code to one such
machine used in a significant share of the market. Our analysis shows that this voting system is far below
even the most minimal security standards applicable in other contexts. We identify several problems
including unauthorized privilege escalation, incorrect use of cryptography, vulnerabilities to network
threats, and poor software development processes. We show that voters, without any insider privileges,
can cast unlimited votes without being detected by any mechanisms within the voting terminal software.
Furthermore, we show that even the most serious of our outsider attacks could have been discovered
and executed without access to the source code. In the face of such attacks, the usual worries about
insider threats are not the only concerns; outsiders can do the damage. That said, we demonstrate that
the insider threat is also quite considerable, showing that not only can an insider, such as a poll worker,
modify the votes, but that insiders can also violate voter privacy and match votes with the voters who
cast them. We conclude that this voting system is unsuitable for use in a general election. Any paperless
electronic voting system might suffer similar flaws, despite any “certification” it could have otherwise
received. We suggest that the best solutions are voting systems having a “voter-verifiable audit trail,”
where a computerized voting system might print a paper ballot that can be read and verified by the voter.