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Fraud possible in Brazil's e-voting system

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Re: Fraud possible in Brazil's e-voting system

#11

Post by ricardobeat »

eduardordm wrote: post #2

"when the TSE granted access to more than 10 million lines of code for five hours." The software itself is very small. They are counting the OS, etc. The software could be safer. But this whole story about those machines involves ego and fights for notoriety between government-run universities, departments and the opposition in place, which changes from time to time. Not exactly FUD, but an exaggeration of the facts.

I'd say republishing these findings from 2012 - which have never been accepted as true - right on elections day is the exact definition of "spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt" :)

Re: Fraud possible in Brazil's e-voting system

#12

Post by rfonseca »

eduardordm wrote: post #2

"when the TSE granted access to more than 10 million lines of code for five hours." The software itself is very small. They are counting the OS, etc. The software could be safer. But this whole story about those machines involves ego and fights for notoriety between government-run universities, departments and the opposition in place, which changes from time to time. Not exactly FUD, but an exaggeration of the facts.

The problem is much bigger than the specific process used or the findings in the verification. If you look at what they found in the code in the short inspection, you would shiver. For example, vote secrecy was protected by storing votes in a shuffled order, where the shuffle was determined with the random seed srand(time(null)).

But still, the problem is the principle: the system is the only source of truth, and if there is fraud, or a bug, that changes votes, it is undetectable and impossible to prove. TO have the fate of 200M people depend on such premise is absurd.

The electronic system must change, but this will only happen if there is awareness and sound technical discussion by the population.

Re: Fraud possible in Brazil's e-voting system

#13

Post by spindritf »

oggy wrote: post #7
ddingus wrote: post #5

SOAP BOX = 1 For what it's worth, e-voting isn't verifiable directly, unless it's done in a way linked to voter identities. Even then, it's highly exploitable, but it is verifiable, depending on the implementation. A trustworthy election embodies these four ideas to the maximum extent possible: 1. Anonymity. Votes cast are not linked to voters who cast them. 2. Transparency. The record of the voter intent, election l…

> For what it's worth, e-voting isn't verifiable directly, > unless it's done in a way linked to voter identities You're missing out on the last 20 years of crypto research. I'd say we're not there yet, but people have been thinking hard about things such as verifiability (with vote confidentiality of course!), coercion resistance etc, and have come up with really cool ideas. As with his other work, David Chaum has s…

Systems that can be understood by maybe 10% of the population aren't really transparent.

Re: Fraud possible in Brazil's e-voting system

#14

Post by xorcist »

ddingus wrote: post #5

SOAP BOX = 1 For what it's worth, e-voting isn't verifiable directly, unless it's done in a way linked to voter identities. Even then, it's highly exploitable, but it is verifiable, depending on the implementation. A trustworthy election embodies these four ideas to the maximum extent possible: 1. Anonymity. Votes cast are not linked to voters who cast them. 2. Transparency. The record of the voter intent, election l…

> Anonymity. Votes cast are not linked to voters who cast them.

And as an extension to this: It is important that it is not possible to prove what you voted for.

This means not only that the link from voter to cast vote must be absent even for the voter, but also that the actual physical circumstances when the vote is cast is subject to the transparency and oversight mentioned above.

Anything else (voting from home, or being presented with a slip linked to your cast vote, or any other such system) is subject to buying and selling votes and the result of such vote would never (and should never) be legitimate in the public eye.

These physcial factors must also be taken into account when designing e-voting systems. It is a hard problem to solve these things in a way that the general voter would understand and therefore should accept.

Re: Fraud possible in Brazil's e-voting system

#15

Post by VLM »

tomjen3 wrote: post #10

E voting could be made safe if the machines printed the users choice on a little slip of paper which was then put into a box, to be counted once the election is over. You could have the machines tally the votes a few seconds after the last poll location closes, but the election result isn't official until the votes has been counted. Any trust in the machines at all and you might as well have the election take place i…

An obvious optimization to that process is having voters fill out an optical "scantron" ballot, then run the ballot thru a scanner and lock the paper ballot away for later spot checking.

You can network the scanners in whatever crude or advanced way you'd like.

This is what Wisconsin has done for about a quarter century.

Re: Fraud possible in Brazil's e-voting system

#16

Post by gabzuka »

tomjen3 wrote: post #10

E voting could be made safe if the machines printed the users choice on a little slip of paper which was then put into a box, to be counted once the election is over. You could have the machines tally the votes a few seconds after the last poll location closes, but the election result isn't official until the votes has been counted. Any trust in the machines at all and you might as well have the election take place i…

This is exactly how voting works in Venezuela. That way you have two vote counts (electronic and physical) which need to match up exactly when counted. This ideally makes it harder to commit a fraud than having just one.

Re: Fraud possible in Brazil's e-voting system

#19

Post by _asummers »

oggy wrote: post #7
ddingus wrote: post #5

SOAP BOX = 1 For what it's worth, e-voting isn't verifiable directly, unless it's done in a way linked to voter identities. Even then, it's highly exploitable, but it is verifiable, depending on the implementation. A trustworthy election embodies these four ideas to the maximum extent possible: 1. Anonymity. Votes cast are not linked to voters who cast them. 2. Transparency. The record of the voter intent, election l…

> For what it's worth, e-voting isn't verifiable directly, > unless it's done in a way linked to voter identities You're missing out on the last 20 years of crypto research. I'd say we're not there yet, but people have been thinking hard about things such as verifiability (with vote confidentiality of course!), coercion resistance etc, and have come up with really cool ideas. As with his other work, David Chaum has s…

Here's[0] a survey paper from 2006 on the state of cryptographic elections.

[0] http://electionmathematics.org/em-voting-systems/rivest-stud...

Re: Fraud possible in Brazil's e-voting system

#20

Post by br_smartass »

I doubt Brazil is ever going back to paper voting. With that said, human vote counting is exploitable/error-prone, too, and electronic vote counting instead of electronic voting seems like it'd have the same issues the voting machine has.

The solution is clear to me, make it open-source, give bounties for issue-fixing. If the current software is crap hire RSA and/or some nice software shop to refactor and audit it, then open-source it.

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