The Best Systems Have The Fewest Secrets
The other night on CNN Lou Dobbs bemoaned the appearance of old voting machines on the auction block at Ebay. He worried that villians would learn how to steal elections if they got access to the equipment. This time Lou missed the point in his otherwise admirable coverage of the voting machine mess brought on by the Help America Vote Act.
What should concern Dobbs is all the secrecy that surrounds the system and the programming for the vote counting gadgets. Only ONE thing shoud be secret about elections–how you mark your ballot. Here’s computer scientist Justin Moore on why this is the goal:
The best systems have the fewest secrets. Anything that needs to be kept secret — such as a password, an encryption key, a physical building key — in order for the system to work securely is a potential point of attack.
The more things that need to be kept secret or secure, the more points of attack.
“Whoops, you can load a new OS [operating system] with a PC card! Better secure it.”
“Whoops, you can modify the audit trail without an
application password. Better keep the OS login secret.” Etc, etc.The best systems are the ones where you can hand over the entire
source code to the attacker, and they still can’t get anywhere. In
other words, the source code reveals no points of attack, and no longer needs to be secret.
But today’s corporate voting machines are so poorly designed and programmed (that’s the charitable view) that they depend on locked storage, passwords, security tape and other devices to protect their “integrity.”
It won’t work.
August 17th, 2006 at 3:28 pm
Lou’s concern reminds me of Ted Stevens’s description of the internet as “tubes.” It’s as if you can unscrew the machine, take a gander inside, and figure out how to hack the code. Sure thing, Lou, and the terrorists didn’t realize their accounts were being tracked prior to the NYTimes’s wiretapping story.
August 19th, 2006 at 7:38 am
My apologies to the commenter for the delay in the appearance of this comment. I think my site is set to allow comments without moderation but Wordpress keeps sending me notice that I must approve the comments. If I don’t see my email for an extended period, someone’s comment could be held in purgatory for that entire period.