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Moscow's blockchain voting system cracked a month before election

zdnet.com

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Re: Moscow's blockchain voting system cracked a month before election

#101

Post by tom_mellior »

mrlala wrote: post #95
maxander wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve never been to Russia and don’t know the Russian attitude towards tech or voting. But I’m confident that if the US had a system like this and made a reasonably usable phone app to be the front end, almost no one under the age of 60 would bother to wait in line for a physical voting booth ever again.

>would bother to wait in line for a physical voting booth ever again As someone living in a state with mail-in ballots, it still boggles my mind waiting in line for physical voting is a thing. Mail-in ballots seem to be the best of all worlds. It's easy. I have time to do the research for who I want to choose. It's all backed by USPS so it's pretty damn secure- as secure as everything else we trust in the mail.

Mail-in means you can be coerced to vote a certain way by someone in your household. It also means someone might be able to get a hold of your ballot papers and vote in your name (there are Austrian politicians who have been convicted for doing just this). The postal service might "lose" ballots depending on whether they come from minority neighborhoods or other characteristics (in Austria, mail-in ballots have the voter's name on the outside). This is different from normal mail since if the postal service regularly lost your mail you would notice and complain; can you tell of your mail-in vote has really arrived? Votes might also be "lost" after they arrive wherever they are meant to be counted; letters presumably need to be guarded for several days, as opposed to votes put in a ballot box and counted later that day (this was one of the factors in the Austrian constitutional court cancelling one round of the most 2016 presidential election).

There are certainly other failure modes. In the last Hungarian parliamentary election the ruling party got less than 50% of the votes overall but literally 99% of the postal vote. That seems rather fishy to me.

Anyway, if you have long lines, that means the people organizing your elections are not doing their job right. There need to be more polling places. Other civilized countries manage this, the US would only need to take their democracy seriously.

Re: Moscow's blockchain voting system cracked a month before election

#102

Post by orbital-decay »

m0zg wrote: post #92
orbital-decay wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Russian presidents don't usually try to dance awkwardly on stage Probably not in the case of Yeltsin though, who willingly jumped from the CPSU Olympus once (which was probably the only relatively bright moment in his career) and was fairly eccentric otherwise, especially when drunk. I was one year short of the voting age back then, but I remember it very well. What you're saying is true, but you're only describing…

^ This is so wonderfully naive, I'm at a loss for words. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/03/russia-us-clinton-boris-y...

Thanks, this is a solid piece describing the amount and the source of money went into that campaign. It doesn't necessarily contradict what I was saying though - Yeltsin wouldn't have won without the oligarchs like Berezovsky or Gusinsky supporting him (and the money of course), there's also no way for him to win with either Nemtsov or Chernomyrdin running for the office, even with the campaign of that scale. And the article you linked seems to be skeptical about the role of those consultants as well.

Re: Moscow's blockchain voting system cracked a month before election

#103

Post by nbabitskiy »

artemave wrote: post #100
nbabitskiy wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excuse me, please, are you living here? Do you really think there is a possibility the majority (or even 10%) of voters will vote digitally? It's so out of character of Russian voters, that I honestly suppose you're a Prigozhin's troll.

codedokode's concerns are spot on. You, on the other hand, do sound like Prigozhin's troll.

I shouldn't have used that language, not proud of myself.

However, codedokode's concerns are utterly irrelevant. Vast majority of Moscow voters won't use this system, neither care whether the election is scientifically legitimate. Those who do have a presumption of guilt wrt Voting Committee (for a thousand good reasons). As a Moscow sociologist put it: "a political party with 30% support aims to get 90% in the City Duma. How would they do that? Obviously, by cheating and violence".

Thus, codedokode's concerns have no meaning inside Russia, and outside they serve only the purpose intended by the creators of all this: for foreigners to scorn imperfect system, and be relieved when they update it to something passable, for the same ultimate effect - steal the election.

Re: Moscow's blockchain voting system cracked a month before election

#104

Post by codedokode »

nbabitskiy wrote: post #90
codedokode wrote: post #83

Researchers overlook more important issue. As the government controls the servers, it can impersonate any number of users. Users submit an application to vote remotely through a government-controlled site and confirm it by receiving a SMS with code. It is obvious that government is able to submit such an application to its own server without bothering the real user. The users vote remotely and confirm their identity…

Excuse me, please, are you living here? Do you really think there is a possibility the majority (or even 10%) of voters will vote digitally? It's so out of character of Russian voters, that I honestly suppose you're a Prigozhin's troll.

I was pointing out that the system is not protected from malicious actions of administrators. What method of voting will the real voters choose doesn't matter here. The government can choose it for them.

The turnout for elections into Moscow Parliament in 2014 was 21%. 79% of voters didn't vote which means that the government can falsify their votes in remote voting and nobody notices.

This time because of protests the turnout might be higher, like 30% or 40%. This still leaves 60% of people who won't vote and whose votes can be used for falsifications.

Re: Moscow's blockchain voting system cracked a month before election

#106

Post by codedokode »

chrisperkins wrote: post #24

Can someone explain what the GitHub org and GitHub repo for https://github.com/moscow-technologies/blockchain-voting is about? If this was about to be used for elections, shouldn't such a critical piece of software have more developers working on it? Why is there only one contributor to the whole project? Why does it have only 37 stars? Is this project well known among the citizens?

I can translate the README:

> This repository contains the code for electronic voting that will be used for Moscow City Parliament elections.

> Purposes of creating this repository

> The repository was created to allow examination of a source code. Although the purpose of the system is electronic voting, we ask to leave comments and open issues only on technical questions. All comments containing political statements will be deleted.

But the code is incomplete. For example, PHP code looks like a "module" for a larger CMS and cannot be run independently. Also, here [1] there is a header that says "prototype" in Russian. And in several files where there should be the rules and explanations for users there is just a placholder, for example in this file [2]. So I assume this is just an early version of code.

This code was published as a part of a challenge to break the encryption used in remote voting.

There is no git history probably because this is just a snapshot, github is not used for development.

[1] https://github.com/moscow-technologies/blockchain-voting/blo...

[2] https://github.com/moscow-technologies/blockchain-voting/blo...

Re: Moscow's blockchain voting system cracked a month before election

#107

Post by codedokode »

chrisperkins wrote: post #24

Can someone explain what the GitHub org and GitHub repo for https://github.com/moscow-technologies/blockchain-voting is about? If this was about to be used for elections, shouldn't such a critical piece of software have more developers working on it? Why is there only one contributor to the whole project? Why does it have only 37 stars? Is this project well known among the citizens?

A translation of another README from here [1]

> Testing cryptographic strength

> Data for testing are in the following directories:

> - data - contains randomly generated data set for applying encryption keys

> - keys - contains encryption keys

> In the beginning of every day, the `data` folder will contain a file with encrypted data and `keys` folder will contain a public key. The task is to decrypt the data in time that is equal to voting duration - 12 hours.

> 12 hours later, original data will be published in the `data` folder and `keys` folder will contain a private key.

[1] https://github.com/moscow-technologies/blockchain-voting/tre...

Re: Moscow's blockchain voting system cracked a month before election

#108

Post by codedokode »

NotSammyHagar wrote: post #97
mrlala wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>would bother to wait in line for a physical voting booth ever again As someone living in a state with mail-in ballots, it still boggles my mind waiting in line for physical voting is a thing. Mail-in ballots seem to be the best of all worlds. It's easy. I have time to do the research for who I want to choose. It's all backed by USPS so it's pretty damn secure- as secure as everything else we trust in the mail.

Yeah. Washington state is all mail-in ballots, once you try it, other ways just seem stupid.

Aren't mail-in ballots too easy to falsify? You take a database of voters and send mail under their names.

Re: Moscow's blockchain voting system cracked a month before election

#109

Post by m0zg »

orbital-decay wrote: post #102
m0zg wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

^ This is so wonderfully naive, I'm at a loss for words. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/03/russia-us-clinton-boris-y...

Thanks, this is a solid piece describing the amount and the source of money went into that campaign. It doesn't necessarily contradict what I was saying though - Yeltsin wouldn't have won without the oligarchs like Berezovsky or Gusinsky supporting him (and the money of course), there's also no way for him to win with either Nemtsov or Chernomyrdin running for the office, even with the campaign of that scale. And the…

Funny how you missed the part about multibillion dollar "loans" which instantaneously disappeared into thin air.
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