Norway tightens IT security to prevent ballot tampering

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-norway-election/norway-tightens-it-security-to-prevent-ballot-tampering-idUSKCN1BC4AH?il=0

by ingve • 9 years ago

62 45 9 years ago

reuters.com

saltvedt• 9 years ago

The machines used to count votes were Windows machines connected to the internet.

https://www.nrk.no/norge/teller-opp-stemmer-i-valget-pa-data...

marksomnian• 9 years ago

If this was a joke it wouldn't be funny. Oh wait.

spaceseaman2• 9 years ago

So when is this gonna blow up for someone?

Like are we gonna read about the U.S. power grid being shut down, or an entire state / nation wide election tampering?

It's absolutely terrifying how incompetent these folks are. Why is there no one marketing their skills to governments who have actual skills? Why aren't governments hiring employees with actual skills?

We used to have the most talented structural, mechanical, and industrial engineers in government positions or as government contractors. Is tech simply too young for that to have happened yet? Or are governments failing to adequately respond to their massive skills' gaps?

empath752• 9 years ago

It already did. Look at the last election.

maaaats• 9 years ago

Tightening it by counting manually, hehe.

Was a big deal earlier this week that the keys and stuff for some municipalities were posted online on their web pages. Edit: it was certificates you had to install in the browser to verify that you were in the position to enter the total amount of votes in your municipality. The url for download were unique and random, but got indexed by search engines because they spy on urls you visit.

https://www.nrk.no/norge/sensitive-valg-filer-for-tre-kommun...

Edit, hmm, downvoted?

JetSpiegel• 9 years ago

I don't speak Norwegian, but this claims Edge sends all visited URL to Bing?

Microsoft taking a page from Google, how quaint.

chha• 9 years ago

There were similar reports earlier this year as well. Autopass, a Norwegian company responsible for most road tolls reported that a bunch of reports became publicly accessible as a result of people using Edge internally, and Evry reported the same regarding a bunch of invoices and other financial information from a client of theirs. (https://www.digi.no/artikler/16-mai-ble-det-full-krisebereds...)

rlkf• 9 years ago

this claims Edge sends all visited URL to Bing?

Yes. So if you instead of attachments of large files in email send an URL such as https://acme.pri/?id=cafe-babe-deadbeeff00d, which is not secured by any other method than obscurity, then Edge will submit it to Bing, which indexes it and then the content is available if you can come up with some keywords that match.

It is fairly well known in Norway, due to having been in the national news earlier this spring, but I have no reason to think it doesn't apply universally.

e12e• 9 years ago

Tightening it by counting manually, hehe.

Yes, rather than "recounting" votes on the same/similar machine - you now need a large conspiracy for large scale election fraud, rather than a single software exploit...

ingve• 9 years ago

Vivaldi browser developer Patricia Aas has done a terrific job bringing awareness to election security issues ahead of the upcoming Norwegian election:

https://twitter.com/pati_gallardo/ (most links are in Norwegian, but Google translate does a reasonable job).

erokar3• 9 years ago

I agree. She raised this concern as a private citizen and debated it on national tv and radio with the ballot bureaucrats who initally dowplayed the issue. If it hadn't been for her, probably nothing would have been done about it.

captchaos99• 9 years ago

Or someone else would have done it.... ;-)

klondike_2• 9 years ago

Computer voting was a mistake. It has been shown over and over that voting machine security is abysmal.

Voting is one of the few things that shouldn't be computerized. It's far easier to swing an election by hacking a few voting machines than to forge thousands of ballots.

No matter where you live, do yourself a favor and vote only on paper.

spaceseaman2• 9 years ago

I think it's a great example of our governments' misunderstanding of modern technology and security. Our current governmental computer systems appear extremely fragile[1] and prone to tampering.

If governments were actually serious about electronic voting, they need dedicated committees and bureaucratic entities whose sole responsibility is the maintenance and security of these systems.

I expect the United State to be absolutely crippled by cyber-warfare in the coming decades. On a state level, our government is simply incapable of recognizing the many vulnerabilities their systems have and compensating for them.

While personally I think electronic voting is a trash idea (couldn't we instead still vote via paper, and then read the results via ML? This would give us a "margin of error" of votes, but we would always have the paper ballots to fall back on), I think that tightening IT security is a good thing for governments to do. Especially considering just how poor computer security is for government entities.

[1]. Just want to mention I'm not a security guru. This is just my interpretation after visiting many government websites, reading stories, etc

QAPereo• 9 years ago

There is always major opposition to anything which would cause many more people to vote, because that would utterly change the current political landscape. The turkeys won't be voting for Thanksgiving.

jacques_chester4• 9 years ago

couldn't we instead still vote via paper, and then read the results via ML?

You just move the single point of failure to an even more difficult-to-prove location.

toomanybeersies• 9 years ago

I am struggling to see how machine learning has any role in this.

erokar3• 9 years ago

Voting is still done on paper in Norway. The votes are often counted automatically by scanning the ballot papers. In addition they will now be counted manually at least once as a security measure.

amptorn2• 9 years ago

Hand-counting only. Hand-count twice for security. To hell with the scanners. Don't introduce fallible, hackable image recognition nonsense to a process which can be entirely paper-based.

blitmap• 9 years ago

Computerized/electronic voting is extremely dangerous to attempt. That said, I feel like I am not well represented with paper ballots behind an electoral college. I feel that we MUST attempt designing and securing this in the open to move forward as a society in the interest of someday having a direct democracy.

(sidenote: direct democracies aren't always pleasant..)

hengheng• 9 years ago

I keep hearing this, but I can't quite bring myself to agree. Let's stay tech-positive and use this problem to advance our industry.

The problem is this: we don't have any machine that simplifies vote counting while being as trustworthy as having many people count marks on many sheets of paper. And since that is prone to errors and manipulation as well, so the bar is actually much lower than "perfection".

Can we really not do trustworthy vote counting better than humans? Can we not make a computer that defeats a human at reliable counting? If we cannot do that, we should reconsider our craft and wonder why. I am not enough of a computer scientist to come up with a good verification plan, but I'd be very surprised if we couldn't do it.

Gullible or corrupt government officials, sneaky sales people and shady politicians are a very different problem. Our job should be to make the machine so good and reliable that these people are driven out of the game.

klondike_2• 9 years ago

The problem is that using a computer reduces this to a single point of failure. It only takes one hack of the vote counting machine to compromise the whole election. Even if you use multiple machines, they're probably running the same software and could all be compromised simultaneously. Computers have no morals and blindly do what they're told to.

When the votes are counted by a group of humans, one person making a mistake (maliciously or not) isn't a big deal because nobody expects humans to be perfect. There are checks in place to catch those mistakes. It would take a huge conspiracy to compromise the entire system.

I suppose there could be a solution in the future, maybe with blockchains or something. Until then, manual counting is the best option.

empath752• 9 years ago

Even if we could, politicians don't want it. The voting systems put in place post 2000 were broken by design.

jacques_chester4• 9 years ago

The problem is this: we don't have any machine that simplifies vote counting while being as trustworthy as having many people count marks on many sheets of paper.

Except there's no problem. Hand counts work fine.

Impatience is not a reason to substantially weaken the foundations of democratic legitimacy.

jfoutz2• 9 years ago

I have no problem with a computer printing out a paper ballot, that the voter can inspect. I have no problem with automated counting of paper ballots. Totally auditable system.

All digital makes me nervous.

colejohnson66• 9 years ago

What if what it prints out isn’t what it submits?

jacques_chester4• 9 years ago

It's far easier to swing an election by hacking a few voting machines than to forge thousands of ballots.

Millions of ballots.

You can go further. Australia has independent electoral commissions which run the elections. Voting is compulsory and preferential. The entire process is overseen by scrutineers -- individuals appointed by candidates -- so there are always multiple mutually-suspicious observers in the room. Many of the most subversible steps in the voting process, for example replacing a ballot box that is full, have to be cross-signed by an electoral official and at least two scrutineers appointed by different candidates.

A hand count is performed three times, again under the supervision of scrutineers.

If there is a arithmetical doubt about the outcome of the election, it can be voided and is re-run from scratch. This has actually happened once when several ballot boxes for the Western Australian senators were lost during a federal election. It was very unlikely, but possible, that those votes could have changed the outcome of the final senate position.

The High Court voided the entire Senate election and it was redone.

Elections must be trustworthy. Cumbersome, people-intensive systems are paradoxically better at this. The odds that a malicious attacker could replace millions of hand-written ballots, subvert hundreds of independent professionals, subvert thousands of independent volunteers, subvert thousands of mutually-hostile scrutineers and also fool thousands of journalists is low.

I would say substantially lower than the odds for being able to subvert a single programmer or sysadmin.

anfractuosity• 9 years ago

Out of interest, with computerised voting do they generally also protect the information of who voted for who?

I might be wrong, but I don't think paper ballots have any identifying information on.

Edit: Hmm, ballot papers do apparently have a unique ID on, which I hadn't noticed before.

tyfon• 9 years ago

Here in Norway at least, all voting is on paper ballot.

You receive an election card (valgkort) in the mail to bring to the polling station containing all your info. ID is also required.

If you forget this card, they can print it out for you.

Then you enter the booth containing party lists. You can't "punch" the wrong party as each have their own ballot. You can erase/add/reprioritize names on the party list you choose though.

Then you put this ballot into an anonymous envelope. This envelope is then put into another envelope along with your election card.

When they count it, they pull out the ballot envelope and the election card, register that you have voted, then someone else will open and count the actual vote.

It seems to me to be pretty secure and anonymous.

andy_ppp• 9 years ago

In case you haven’t seen this breakdown by Tom Scott about why electronic voting is lunicy, here it is: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI

alain_gilbert2• 9 years ago

Just a wild thought I had:

If you remember the invisible dots that printers add, so the government can track where something was printed. ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14501894 )

I wonder if some government did/are/could use this technologies to deanonymize voters.

For example they would print your SSN on the piece of paper that you are voting on.

askvictor4• 9 years ago

It might be possible, but quite difficult in practice given that a voter can show up at any time to any number of voting stations.

alain_gilbert2• 9 years ago

It's been a while I haven't voted. I'm from Canada and currently live abroad.

But If I remember well, I had to actually vote at a specific place.

The part I don't remember well is if they were giving me a specific sheet of paper, or just take one on the top of a stack.

I remember they were looking for my name, and I have a souvenir that they detached the side of the sheet (but this is vague).

I guess it was a stack :)

askvictor4• 9 years ago

Reposting what a few 2nd level comments have already said: voting is still done on paper in Norway; the counting if what is being done electronically.

amptorn2• 9 years ago

Oh good, so you just have to hack the counting machine?

askvictor4• 9 years ago

Yes, that's the point of the security overhaul. But at least paper votes can be recounted and verified.

nkristoffersen• 9 years ago

Isn't blockchain tech perfect for voting?

Norway tightens IT security to prevent ballot tampering

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