Cyber-attacks on the upcoming presidential election?

[Aimless]

http://arstechnica.com/security/2016...board-systems/

There are vulnerabilities at numerous levels of the election system and it would seem that at least some are being actively exploited. Who's responsible? How far will they go? And how should/will the US respond when Trump wins the election with Putin's help?

[Steely Glint]

Electronic voting is a terrible idea.

[Hazir]

I didn't see anything about the actual voting process. But I am wondering; are they actually allowing voting in an online-environment?

[Aimless]

No but I believe there are many districts where the voting process is, theoretically, very vulnerable to attacks of varying degrees of sophistication, with limited means of objectively verifying the results.

[LittleFuzzy]

I didn't see anything about the actual voting process. But I am wondering; are they actually allowing voting in an online-environment?

No.

I will point out, this isn't necessarily to do with any kind of voter fraud. These are large databases stock full of information phishers like (not the credit cards they're usually after, granted, but lots of material for identity theft or fraudulent credit applications, for instance) and they're not necessarily that well protected.

[EyeKhan]

What I've read is that voter rolls are the biggest vulnerability. They're commonly kept in vulnerable municipal databases that could be hacked to mess around with voter eligibility or something. If you can create confusion on election day and significantly reduce the number of voters in certain areas, you can affect the outcome of an election. This is the whole point of all the voter ID laws in conservative states - poor people are less likely to have IDs and less likely to jump through hoops to get them, so that requirement is likely to keep significant numbers of them from voting.

A lot of states have voter machines that are entirely electronic and no paper ballot backup, a prime opportunity to rig the vote. These machines are not kept on-line, so rigging would have to happen on a machine by machine basis at a lot of polling stations to pull off large scale fraud. And a conspiracy like that would be hard to pull off. But you never know, especially in very close elections. In Michigan we complete a paper ballot and when done we hand it to a poll worker who runs it through a scanning machine. Then the paper ballot is kept on file. That way you get the efficiency of computerization while maintaining a paper backup. It's surprising, really, because Michigan is so completely fucked up in most other ways....

[Steely Glint]

I didn't see anything about the actual voting process. But I am wondering; are they actually allowing voting in an online-environment?

Probably because the process is different in different parts of the US. Some of them use all paper systems, some of them use those touch screen machines and some of them use weird hybrid systems like the one Chooobs described.

In general, the security problems with electronic voting are:

1) Verification that the software on the machine is doing what it's supposed to be doing
2) Verification that *all* the individual machines are actually running the software you verified in stage one
3) Verification that the results transmitted from the machines at the polling stations are the same ones that arrived at the counting place

In general, if a state actor (*cough* Russia *cough*) wanted to mount an attack into to throw the result of an election to their preferred candidate (*cough* Donald Trump *cough*) they could probably do so without having employing anywhere near the level of technological sophisticating of something like Stuxnet.

Internet voting, obviously, can fuck off forever.

[Lewkowski]

Its not like you even need an ID to vote or that dead people haven't vote in previous elections...

[LittleFuzzy]

Its not like you even need an ID to vote or that dead people haven't vote in previous elections...

Any noticable voter fraud coming from foreign sources would be something very new though.

[GGT]

Probably because the process is different in different parts of the US. Some of them use all paper systems, some of them use those touch screen machines and some of them use weird hybrid systems like the one Chooobs described.

In general, the security problems with electronic voting are:

1) Verification that the software on the machine is doing what it's supposed to be doing
2) Verification that *all* the individual machines are actually running the software you verified in stage one
3) Verification that the results transmitted from the machines at the polling stations are the same ones that arrived at the counting place

In general, if a state actor (*cough* Russia *cough*) wanted to mount an attack into to throw the result of an election to their preferred candidate (*cough* Donald Trump *cough*) they could probably do so without having employing anywhere near the level of technological sophisticating of something like Stuxnet.

Internet voting, obviously, can fuck off forever.

But many states DO have internet voter registration. I'm not sure how my state (PA) verifies those on-line registrations, when so many of our agencies are antiquated and paper-oriented, but it was super easy for my kids to register to vote in just a few key strokes.

Its not like you even need an ID to vote or that dead people haven't vote in previous elections...

That "dead people voting" is mostly an urban myth, as there are only a handful of proven voter fraud incidents. The truth is -- it's easier to get a gun license than a driver's license, let alone a voter ID.

[Lewkowski]

http://www.breitbart.com/california/...ng-california/

And that's recent to say nothing of other examples in US history...

[GGT]

No, I won't click on a Breitbart link. It's a site known for conspiracy theories and all kinds of weird shit. That you're using it to defend/support your position just reinforces that your opinions are based on shit.

[Aimless]

You might think that combining wifi and voting is just a spectacularly stupid idea, but they're going to require hackers to show photo ID.

https://www.kentucky.com/news/politi...219508945.html

[Wraith]

Blockchain-based voting is actually a pretty good idea, it'd just require some infrastructure that doesn't exist yet.

Wireless voting systems probably aren't the best idea, though. It could be secure, but from past voting machines I don't have a ton of faith that the producing company used people who know what they're doing; voting machine contracts seem to be handed to either the lowest bidder or the company that gives the most kickbacks to politicians.

Electronic voting is not inherently a bad idea. I think a lot of people & reporters tend to overstate the risks. It's possible to make them much more secure than paper ballots, because paper ballots aren't very secure anyways - consider how many times ballots have been misplaced, or how many times they've been "misplaced". It just doesn't seem like governments and the companies they contract are too interested in going to the lengths necessary to secure it.

edit: I'm probably being too hard here; a big part of the problem is probably just that the people who decide who to give the contracts to aren't computer people. Things like allowing wireless software updates can greatly decrease the cost of operation, and the people deciding aren't knowledgeable enough to realize it also makes the system much more difficult to fully secure. All they hear is that it saves money.