Utah voting system fending off 1B hacking attempts per day • Hacker News Board

Re: Utah voting system fending off 1B hacking attempts per day

#31

Post by andrewflnr » Sat, Jul 07, 2018, 8:54 PM UTC

User23 wrote: post #10

xeeeeeeeeeeenu wrote: post #6

What does "hacking attempt" even mean? I smell FUD.

Sadly I smell FUD virtually every time a security engineer opens his mouth. Yes there are some great ones, but I’ve never worked with one directly. Part of my skepticism is rooted in the prevalent ignorance of basic computing theory. If you can’t define the operational semantics of a system then you can’t rigorously convince yourself or anyone else that it is “secure.”

Honestly, a lot of systems have enough low-hanging fruit that formalizing the semantics is probably not worth it. Can people outside this small list get a shell on your server? Then it's not secure. Let's start there.

Re: Utah voting system fending off 1B hacking attempts per day

#32

Post by stretchwithme » Sat, Jul 07, 2018, 8:56 PM UTC

propman wrote: post #21

Paper ballots, no machines and especially no machines connected to the internet...if we were able to get that crazy bug into Iranian nuclear reactors without direct transfer from Internet, then you can bet North Korea, Russia, Israel, and China will pour billions to do the same thing. Voting ID cards too, though I admit I don’t know enough about that. Even if it costs billions to get it done, confidence in fair and f…

No need to carry an ID card if you can look up each voter's face.

Electronic voting systems were supposedly created to prevent the hanging chad problem. But all we actually needed was a way to properly punch the cards instead of relying upon people to do it manually.

Card punch machines have been around forever. Open source software running on a PC with a card punch attached is all we really needed. And you can count the votes to double check the count of the cards. But you don't have to stop relying on the physical cards.

You could even have machines at the polling place that voters could use to verify that their ballot was properly encoded before they turn it in. A PC with a punch card reader running open source software.

http://blog.reinventdemocracy.org/2004/10/about-electronic-v...

Re: Utah voting system fending off 1B hacking attempts per day

#33

Post by azinman2 » Sat, Jul 07, 2018, 8:56 PM UTC

danielhlockard wrote: post #27

king_nothing wrote: post #11

If they have such hacking attempts, console access should be gated by a jumpbox that SSH/ipsec secured by SPA portknocking. For external services, have transparent proxies with deep SPI/IPS and IP acls out in front.

Port knocking is security by obscurity. How about a VPN like a real company.

Google famously ditched VPNs because you can’t trust the inside networks either.

https://www.blog.google/products/google-cloud/how-use-beyond...

Re: Utah voting system fending off 1B hacking attempts per day

#34

Post by throwawayjava » Sat, Jul 07, 2018, 8:58 PM UTC

User23 wrote: post #10

xeeeeeeeeeeenu wrote: post #6

What does "hacking attempt" even mean? I smell FUD.

Sadly I smell FUD virtually every time a security engineer opens his mouth. Yes there are some great ones, but I’ve never worked with one directly. Part of my skepticism is rooted in the prevalent ignorance of basic computing theory. If you can’t define the operational semantics of a system then you can’t rigorously convince yourself or anyone else that it is “secure.”

> If you can’t define the operational semantics of a system then you can’t rigorously convince yourself or anyone else that it is “secure.”

Well. This means no one can provide any security guarantee for any remotely realistic system because no modern stack has a completely understood&formalized operational semantics. But I definitely know that some systems are much more secure than others! So this seems like a situation where perfect is very much the enemy of "1000x better than it could've been".

Furthermore, formalization is "above and beyond" best practice, so you're unlikely to be accused of negligence if you do "better than best practice but still not formalized".

Finally, the original claim is not true. There are many systems with non-operational semantics that are useful for proving security properties. And sometimes no semantics is needed at all for large swaths of the system. Sandboxing is an excellent example of the latter. For some very reasonable attacker models, you need an operational semantics for the sandbox but don't need an operational semantics for whatever's running inside the sandbox in order to provide fairly strong security guarantees.

Re: Utah voting system fending off 1B hacking attempts per day

#35

Post by tzahola » Sat, Jul 07, 2018, 8:58 PM UTC

erentz wrote: post #25

propman wrote: post #21

Paper ballots, no machines and especially no machines connected to the internet...if we were able to get that crazy bug into Iranian nuclear reactors without direct transfer from Internet, then you can bet North Korea, Russia, Israel, and China will pour billions to do the same thing. Voting ID cards too, though I admit I don’t know enough about that. Even if it costs billions to get it done, confidence in fair and f…

I’m not sure why ID cards are necessary. If we wanted to do that we would need to make them very easy and free for everybody to get, including getting them on the day of the election. Otherwise it becomes too much of a tool to deny part of the population the ability to vote. (Which is sadly how it’s been used so far in the USA as far as I can tell.) What is needed is verification against double voting. You must enrol…

>Otherwise it becomes too much of a tool to deny part of the population the ability to vote.

Like the existing voter registration system?

Re: Utah voting system fending off 1B hacking attempts per day

#36

Post by lwansbrough » Sat, Jul 07, 2018, 8:59 PM UTC

User23 wrote: post #10

xeeeeeeeeeeenu wrote: post #6

What does "hacking attempt" even mean? I smell FUD.

Sadly I smell FUD virtually every time a security engineer opens his mouth. Yes there are some great ones, but I’ve never worked with one directly. Part of my skepticism is rooted in the prevalent ignorance of basic computing theory. If you can’t define the operational semantics of a system then you can’t rigorously convince yourself or anyone else that it is “secure.”

Security isn’t about developing a perfectly secure system, it’s about mitigating the likelihood of your imperfect system being infiltrated. The same is true of military, etc.

No competent person is going to tell you that the system is unhackable.

Re: Utah voting system fending off 1B hacking attempts per day

#37

Post by zemnmez » Sat, Jul 07, 2018, 9:00 PM UTC

to put this in perspective, this is one-quarter of Google's global search traffic, in hack attempts. 'hack attempts' are always bullshit but this is especially impressive

Re: Utah voting system fending off 1B hacking attempts per day

#38

Post by NortySpock » Sat, Jul 07, 2018, 9:02 PM UTC

stretchwithme wrote: post #32

propman wrote: post #21

Paper ballots, no machines and especially no machines connected to the internet...if we were able to get that crazy bug into Iranian nuclear reactors without direct transfer from Internet, then you can bet North Korea, Russia, Israel, and China will pour billions to do the same thing. Voting ID cards too, though I admit I don’t know enough about that. Even if it costs billions to get it done, confidence in fair and f…

No need to carry an ID card if you can look up each voter's face. Electronic voting systems were supposedly created to prevent the hanging chad problem. But all we actually needed was a way to properly punch the cards instead of relying upon people to do it manually. Card punch machines have been around forever. Open source software running on a PC with a card punch attached is all we really needed. And you can count…

Why do we need to use card punch machines? Here in Missouri, we optically scan inked ballots. Inkavote is the name of the system. Why bother with punching out the card?

http://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/voting-systems/oversight/vot...

Re: Utah voting system fending off 1B hacking attempts per day

#39

Post by stretchwithme » Sat, Jul 07, 2018, 9:02 PM UTC

voronoff wrote: post #26

erentz wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure why ID cards are necessary. If we wanted to do that we would need to make them very easy and free for everybody to get, including getting them on the day of the election. Otherwise it becomes too much of a tool to deny part of the population the ability to vote. (Which is sadly how it’s been used so far in the USA as far as I can tell.) What is needed is verification against double voting. You must enrol…

It works here. Voting fraud is incredibly rare.

How do we know it's incredibly rare?

What evidence would we need to know that all persons voting are actually valid voters?

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

We have cases in California of people voting with their dead relatives' ballots. This a lot easier with voting by mail.

Re: Utah voting system fending off 1B hacking attempts per day

#40

Post by yjftsjthsd-h » Sat, Jul 07, 2018, 9:02 PM UTC

lihaciudaniel wrote: post #15

raverbashing wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And attempted accesses to /wp-admin.php ? (you get those regardless of the technology on the backend, a lot of malicious vuln. scanners around test for that)

I think Drupal would be better for government websites.

I think the point was that you get attempts on /wp-admin.php even if you're not running wordpress at all. I mean, my personal blog is a static collection of HTML pages and I still see /wp-admin.php in logs.

In fact, I've long wondered whether this isn't a great opportunity; I'd like to make a script that went through logs and got every IP trying to access such a path, and adds those IPs to a blacklist that gets dropped at the firewall. Not even a honeypot (since they try even when there's nothing there at all), but still a way to catch (really stupid) bad actors / compromised systems.