Voting Machines Used Between 2002 and 2014 Found Trivial to Hack Remotely

[unokitty]

Voting machine password hacks as easy as 'abcde'

“You could have broken into one of these with a very small amount of technical assistance,” Epstein said. “I could teach you how to do it over the phone. It might require an administrator password, but that’s okay, the password is ‘admin’.”

... the version of Windows operating on each of them had not been updated since at least 2004..

... the units have been used in at least two dozen elections across the state. Mississippi and Pennsylvania stopped using them several years ago. Epstein said it is likely no one will ever know whether or not they were tampered with.

“There are no logs kept in the systems,” Epstein said...

“Bottom line is that if no Virginia elections were ever hacked (and we have no way of knowing if it happened), it’s because no one with even a modicum of skill tried,” ...

e-voting machine so easy to hack, it will take your breath away

The AVS WINVote, made by Advanced Voting Solutions, passed necessary voting systems standards and has been used in Virginia and, until recently, in Pennsylvania and Mississippi. It used the easy-to-crack passwords of "admin," "abcde," and "shoup" to lock down its Windows administrator account, Wi-Fi network, and voting results database respectively...

The weak passwords—which are hard-coded and can't be changed...
The Wi-Fi network the machines use is encrypted with wired equivalent privacy, an algorithm so weak that it takes as little as 10 minutes for attackers to break a network's encryption key... the WINVote runs a version of Windows XP Embedded that hasn't received a security patch since 2004,...

If an election was held using the AVS WinVote, and it wasn’t hacked, it was only because no one tried... Further, there are no logs or other records that would indicate if such a thing ever happened, so if an election was hacked any time in the past, we will never know.

How would someone use these vulnerabilities to change an election?
Take your laptop to a polling place, and sit outside in the parking lot.
Use a free sniffer to capture the traffic, and use that to figure out the WEP password (which VITA did for us).
Connect to the voting machine over WiFi.
If asked for a password, the administrator password is “admin” (VITA provided that).
Download the Microsoft Access database using Windows Explorer.
Use a free tool to extract the hardwired key (“shoup&#8221, which VITA also did for us.
Use Microsoft Access to add, delete, or change any of the votes in the database.
Upload the modified copy of the Microsoft Access database back to the voting machine.
Wait for the election results to be published.

Trivial hard coded admin password. Check.
Obsolete WEP wireless security. Check.
No system logs. Check.

My twelve year old niece could sit in the parking lot outside the voting center with an old version of Back Track and hack this.

With a pringles can yagi, she could hack it from a block away...

But I want you to know that your vote is very important to the government. You owe it to your government to vote...

LOL

Uno

 

[mikeymikec]

Good ol' Diebold.

 

[PokerGuy]

Oh, but who needs an old fashioned paper trail anyway?? Why are you so paranoid, why don't you trust that nobody will mess with these things with so little on the line? After all, it's not like billions are spent trying to get people elected or anything, nobody would ever have an incentive to tamper with these things /sarcasm

This is pretty much the expected level of incompetence for government work and government contracted work, it's one of the reasons I still favor the old paper ballots until we can come up with an electronic system with all the checks and balances to ensure nobody can easily tamper with the results.

 

[thraashman]

Oh, but who needs an old fashioned paper trail anyway?? Why are you so paranoid, why don't you trust that nobody will mess with these things with so little on the line? After all, it's not like billions are spent trying to get people elected or anything, nobody would ever have an incentive to tamper with these things /sarcasm

This is pretty much the expected level of incompetence for government work and government contracted work, it's one of the reasons I still favor the old paper ballots until we can come up with an electronic system with all the checks and balances to ensure nobody can easily tamper with the results.

I see an issue with this statement. You seem to be claiming that an otherwise competent private company somehow magically becomes incompetent as soon as they take up a government contract. I think this is just a company that's wholly incompetent and should not have been given the job but probably was due to some form of nepotism. Which is an issue that can come up in public and private sector.

 

[boomerang]

This is pretty much the expected level of incompetence for government work and government contracted work, it's one of the reasons I still favor the old paper ballots until we can come up with an electronic system with all the checks and balances to ensure nobody can easily tamper with the results.

There is no electronic system that will be secure enough - ever. And I challenge anyone to describe to me a system that would be secure. With paper ballots it comes down to who is counting those ballots.

Until morality and a strong sense of what is right and what is wrong is restored, we will continue to circle the drain.

 

[cabri]

There is no electronic system that will be secure enough - ever. And I challenge anyone to describe to me a system that would be secure. With paper ballots it comes down to who is counting those ballots.

Until morality and a strong sense of what is right and what is wrong is restored, we will continue to circle the drain.

Hardwire (hub) each electronic voting machine to a local inhouse server at the voting location
Have the server either use a Ethernet connecting back to the state HQ or have the people collect the counts from the server and call it in.

 

[boomerang]

Hardwire (hub) each electronic voting machine to a local inhouse server at the voting location
Have the server either use a Ethernet connecting back to the state HQ or have the people collect the counts from the server and call it in.

Nope. There are human beings involved.

 

[Mandres]

I'm shocked that they have the results database on machine(s) connected to a wireless network. That's just ... insanely incompetent.

I'm the tabulations supervisor for my County in Texas. None of our voting terminals, or the central tabulating computers, are networked at all per direction of the state legislature. Transfer of encrypted results files from the terminals to the central tabulation station is done physically using electronic media cards in a secure procedure.

No electronic system is 100% secure, but it's a hell of a lot harder to hack a computer if you have to gain physical access to it.

 

[dank69]

Nope. There are human beings involved.

I already described the perfect system awhile ago in a previous thread. You vote in person and the system generates a random number which it gives to you. That random number is your user ID for this specific election and you can log on to a website where you can look up your random number and see that your votes are listed properly. Everyone can see the whole database and verify counts and such but nobody knows what your number is so anonymity is maintained.

 

[Jhhnn]

I already described the perfect system awhile ago in a previous thread. You vote in person and the system generates a random number which it gives to you. That random number is your user ID for this specific election and you can log on to a website where you can look up your random number and see that your votes are listed properly. Everyone can see the whole database and verify counts and such but nobody knows what your number is so anonymity is maintained.

You realize, I hope, that people could sell their votes in a verifiable way...

 

[dank69]

You realize, I hope, that people could sell their votes in a verifiable way...

Is that really a problem? I only ask because people could buy votes now they just can't verify. What percentage of people would take the money and vote the opposite way they are being paid? I dunno. Hell, if someone wanted verification people could wear a body camera to the poll as it is now.

 

[boomerang]

I already described the perfect system awhile ago in a previous thread. You vote in person and the system generates a random number which it gives to you. That random number is your user ID for this specific election and you can log on to a website where you can look up your random number and see that your votes are listed properly. Everyone can see the whole database and verify counts and such but nobody knows what your number is so anonymity is maintained.

Nope. There are still people involved. The vulnerabilities in our systems are not technological in nature, they can all be traced backed to the humans that designed them, maintained them or interacted with them in some manner.

Our very first crudest computer systems were entirely capable of counting and basic math. It's a people problem. Those that want to manipulate the system will always be able to do so.

 

[Newell Steamer]

Oh, but who needs an old fashioned paper trail anyway??

Yeah, because you of all people are trusting when it comes to paper,....

 

[PokerGuy]

I see an issue with this statement. You seem to be claiming that an otherwise competent private company somehow magically becomes incompetent as soon as they take up a government contract.

Yep, to an extent that's pretty much what happens. When they know there's no good oversight, and very few controls on how much money is spent (and how), and there are few if any incentives to remain efficient and do a great job, it doesn't take long for corners to start getting cut and inefficiencies to creep in.

I think this is just a company that's wholly incompetent and should not have been given the job but probably was due to some form of nepotism. Which is an issue that can come up in public and private sector.

That is certainly a possibility, and that comes back to government incompetence. If the process for procurement and contracts is such that it can't ensure that jobs are done to spec, then you're going to get shoddy work for the taxpayer dollar.

 

[dank69]

Nope. There are still people involved. The vulnerabilities in our systems are not technological in nature, they can all be traced backed to the humans that designed them, maintained them or interacted with them in some manner.

Our very first crudest computer systems were entirely capable of counting and basic math. It's a people problem. Those that want to manipulate the system will always be able to do so.

But the results are verifiable?

 

[PokerGuy]

Yeah, because you of all people are trusting when it comes to paper,....

I have a heck of a lot more trust in that paper than I'd have if someone just showed a computer record with the same information. The latter can be easily created at any point, while the former is much more difficult to accurately forge.

 

[PokerGuy]

I already described the perfect system awhile ago in a previous thread. You vote in person and the system generates a random number which it gives to you. That random number is your user ID for this specific election and you can log on to a website where you can look up your random number and see that your votes are listed properly. Everyone can see the whole database and verify counts and such but nobody knows what your number is so anonymity is maintained.

Seems like a reasonable way to do it, but it wouldn't be long before some website would pop up (probably outside the US to avoid jurisdiction) offering people $25 or $50 for their 'verified' vote in some election. With the collective billions spent on elections, how difficult would it be for someone to buy ten million votes at $50 a piece? You don't think there are any state or private actors in the world that could come up with $500 million??

Sure, you could try to buy votes today with various ways to verify, but none of them so easy and reliable.

 

[dank69]

Seems like a reasonable way to do it, but it wouldn't be long before some website would pop up (probably outside the US to avoid jurisdiction) offering people $25 or $50 for their 'verified' vote in some election. With the collective billions spent on elections, how difficult would it be for someone to buy ten million votes at $50 a piece? You don't think there are any state or private actors in the world that could come up with $500 million??

Sure, you could try to buy votes today with various ways to verify, but none of them so easy and reliable.

Okay but how many people were going to vote that way anyway? There is no way to be sure you are actually paying someone to switch their vote.

 

[boomerang]

But the results are verifiable?

Put me in charge of overseeing that database. Are you comfortable with that?

 

[dank69]

Put me in charge of overseeing that database. Are you comfortable with that?

I don't think you are grasping the concept. If you change the database I will see that my votes are no longer correct.

 

[boomerang]

I don't think you are grasping the concept. If you change the database I will see that my votes are no longer correct.

How do you know you're seeing the true database? The database that reflects how votes were actually cast? Remember, I can see the historical data on which people actually cast their votes and then actually check them. I see the logs. I also know which people didn't vote or don't vote. I also know which people have died and are still on the rolls, etc. It goes on and on. If I see that dank69 always checks his for accuracy, I will make sure that dank69's reflects accurately. The overwhelming majority of people that do not and voted are fair game.

On a precinct by precinct level, this would be a piece of cake.

It's all down to human beings. Restoration of high moral standards and a strong sense of doing what is right is the key. Without those, any system that can be manipulated will be manipulated. And they all can be.

 

[dank69]

How do you know you're seeing the true database? The database that reflects how votes were actually cast? Remember, I can see the historical data on which people actually cast their votes and then actually check them. I see the logs. I also know which people didn't vote or don't vote. I also know which people have died and are still on the rolls, etc. It goes on and on. If I see that dank69 always checks his for accuracy, I will make sure that dank69's reflects accurately. The overwhelming majority of people that do not and voted are fair game.

On a precinct by precinct level, this would be a piece of cake.

It's all down to human beings. Restoration of high moral standards and a strong sense of doing what is right is the key. Without those, any system that can be manipulated will be manipulated. And they all can be.

But you don't know when someone who never checked before suddenly decides to do so. Then you are busted. All the result are permanently in the public domain so any tampering will be difficult to hide.

It's possible to store passwords as encrypted data that even the DB admins can't see, correct?

 

[Jaepheth]

Shouldn't these devices use WORM drives that would be replaced each election? The drives can then be archived for future reference/recounts

 

[Jhhnn]

I see an issue with this statement. You seem to be claiming that an otherwise competent private company somehow magically becomes incompetent as soon as they take up a government contract. I think this is just a company that's wholly incompetent and should not have been given the job but probably was due to some form of nepotism. Which is an issue that can come up in public and private sector.

Heh. Being a software issue, I'd suggest that you need to realize that vendors' greatest talent is in their sales force. They're superb con men. Hell, big outfits even hire consultants to help them figure it out, and they're con men, too. They won't lie to you, (well, maybe) they'll just make the whole thing seem to be something it isn't.

Given the ever changing nature of the beast, of hardware, software & hackers, I don't think that anybody is truly competent to fully evaluate the security of electronic voting. Period. Therefore, a paper trail must exist to keep it more honest. It's the only way to be sure.

 

[dank69]

Heh. Being a software issue, I'd suggest that you need to realize that vendors' greatest talent is in their sales force. They're superb con men. Hell, big outfits even hire consultants to help them figure it out, and they're con men, too. They won't lie to you, (well, maybe) they'll just make the whole thing seem to be something it isn't.

Given the ever changing nature of the beast, of hardware, software & hackers, I don't think that anybody is truly competent to fully evaluate the security of electronic voting. Period. Therefore, a paper trail must exist to keep it more honest. It's the only way to be sure.

I don't know. You still need humans to read the paper and perform counts, or build a machine that reads and counts, and you have no way to verify that those humans are being honest. The only way to be sure is to get the results into public domain in a way that each individual voter can verify that their vote has been counted correctly. All the data should be available for download to anyone who wants to data mine the results.