Military drops project for voting via Internet 
02.06.04

REUTERS
 
WASHINGTON - The Pentagon said Thursday it had scrapped its program to allow U.S. troops and other Americans overseas to vote through the Internet because the system was so vulnerable to computer hackers it could cast doubt on the election results.
 
The Pentagon heeded the advice of cybersecurity experts who urged in a Jan. 21 report that the program be abandoned because it was impossible to create a voting system with current personal computers and the Internet that would stop hackers or terrorists from tampering with election results.
 
The $22 million Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment, or SERVE, was supposed to allow 100,000 U.S. troops and civilians overseas to vote through the Internet this year.
 
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz wrote a memo on Jan. 30 saying the Pentagon "will not be using the SERVE Internet voting project in view of the inability to assure legitimacy of votes that would be cast using the system, which thereby brings into doubt the integrity of election results."
 
The first tryout for the SERVE system had been scheduled for this past Tuesday's South Carolina presidential primary, but the Pentagon put the system on hold. More...
 
© 2004 AzStarNet, Arizona Daily Star.

 

Report Says Internet Voting System Is Too Insecure to Use
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
New York Times
01.21.04

A new $22 million system to allow soldiers and other Americans overseas to vote via the Internet is inherently insecure and should be abandoned, according to a panel of computer security experts asked by the government to review the program.

The system, Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment, or SERVE, was developed with financing from the Department of Defense and will first be used in this year's primaries and general election.

The authors of the new report noted that computer security experts had already voiced increasingly strong warnings about the reliability of electronic voting systems, but they said the new voting program, which allows people overseas to vote from their personal computers over the Internet, raised the ante on such systems' risks.

The system, they wrote, "has numerous other fundamental security problems that leave it vulnerable to a variety of well-known cyber attacks, any one of which could be catastrophic." Any system for voting over the Internet with common personal computers, they noted, would suffer from the same risks.

The trojans, viruses and other attacks that complicate modern life and allow such crimes as online snooping and identity theft could enable hackers to disrupt or even alter the course of elections, the report concluded. Such attacks "could have a devastating effect on public confidence in elections," the report's authors wrote, and so "the best course to take is not to field the SERVE system at all."

A spokesman for the Department of Defense said the critique overstated the importance of the security risks in online voting. "The Department of Defense stands by the SERVE program," the spokesman, Glenn Flood, said. "We feel it's right on, at this point, and we're going to use it."

An official of Accenture, the technology services company that is the main contractor on the project, said the researchers drew unwarranted conclusions about future plans for the voting project. "We are doing a small, controlled experiment," said Meg McLauglin, president of Accenture eDemocracy Services.

The Federal Voting Assistance Program, part of the Department of Defense, plans to officially introduce the program in the next few weeks. Seven states have signed up so far to participate: Arkansas, Florida, Hawaii, North Carolina, South Carolina, Utah and Washington. As many as 100,000 people are expected to use the system this year, and the total eligible population would about one million.

A move to that larger population of voters is far from certain, Ms. McLauglin said, and the final system could be very different from the one being used this year. "It will be up to Congress and the states to determine if this gets expanded, and how," she said.`

"Without doing these experiments, we won't learn more and we won't learn how to help these folks vote in the future," she said.

Trying to vote overseas can be a frustrating ordeal. And Internet voting makes intuitive sense to Americans who have grown accustomed to buying books, banking and even finding mates online.

But the authors of the report adamantly state that what works for electronic commerce doesn't work for electronic democracy: "E-commerce grade security is not good enough for elections," they wrote. The dual requirements of authentication and anonymity make voting very different from most online purchases, they wrote, and failures and fraud are covered by Internet merchants and credit card companies. "How do we recover if an election is compromised?" they wrote.

The report states, "We recognize that no security system is perfect, and it would be irresponsible and naïve to demand perfection; but we must not allow unacceptable risks of election fraud to taint our national elections."

They said any new system "should be as secure as current absentee voting systems and should not introduce any new or expanded vulnerabilities into the election beyond those already present."

One of the authors of the report, David Wagner, an assistant professor in the Computer Science Division at the University of California at Berkeley, said, "The bottom line is we feel the solution can't be a system that introduces greater risks just to gain convenience."

Although some of the possible attacks may sound far-fetched or arcane, the security experts said that each of them had already been seen in some form out on the Internet.

"We're not making up any theoretical concepts," said Aviel D. Rubin, an author of the report and the technical director of the Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins University. "These are all things that occur in the wild that we see all the time."

Computers on the Internet have become ever more vulnerable to malicious software that takes over the machines' functions to monitor the users' activities, scan them for private information or press them into service to launch attacks on other computers, to send spam or advertise Internet pornography sites online. "And we're going to use these as voting booths?" Mr. Rubin asked. "It just doesn't make any sense."

A major American election would be an irresistible target for hackers, and the ability of computers to automate tasks means that many attacks could be carried out on a large scale, the report said. More... (link to New York Times)