I’ve been involved in a discussion about how to build internet voting software for a general election. We’ve reached a general consensus that there exist plenty of secure methods for two way authentication and communication.
However, someone came along and pointed out that in a general election some of the machines being used are almost certainly going to be compromised. To quote:
Let me be an evil electoral fraudster.
I want to sample peoples votes as they
vote and hope I get something
scandalous. I hire a bot-net from some
really shady dudes who control 1000
compromised machines in the UK just
for election day.I capture the voting habits of 1000
voters on election day. I notice 5 of
them have voted BNP. I look these
users up and check out their machines,
I look through their documents on
their machine and find out their names
and addresses. I find out one of them
is the wife of a tory MP. I leak ‘wife
of tory mp is a fascist!’ to some
blogger I know. It hits the internet
and goes viral, swings an election.
That’s a serious problem!
So, what are the best techniques for running software where user interactions with the software must be kept secret, on a machine which is possibly compromised?
It can’t be done. Fortunately, banks face exactly the same problem, so those little home chip’n’pin doohickies are pretty cheap.
So, if you want secure online voting, you send a custom voting doohicky to everyone who applies for one. This doohicky signs and encrypts their vote before sending it to the PC to be transmitted over the wire. The only thing an attacker on the wire can do, is eavesdrop whether or not the voter voted at all. Since political parties already do this, by posting party workers outside polling stations, that’s not a significant risk to the system 😉
You still face some of the problems of postal voting, such as vote buying and coercion, or stealing someone’s doohicky, but only via physical access, not by compromising their PC. There’s obvious DOS attacks if you rely on home internet connections, but there’s no reason the voter can’t have the option of going to the polling station if their connection goes down.
Whether the doohicky is cheap enough is still doubtful – I guess they cost a few pounds each, which I don’t think is cheap on the scale of what is actually spent on elections. But they’re not infeasibly expensive. I doubt they save much money at polling stations, unfortunately. The cost of polling in the UK depends pretty much on the number of polling stations. Problems this time notwithstanding, the number of polling stations isn’t driven by the need to provide a fast enough throughput, it’s driven by a desire that people not have to travel far to get to them. So having fewer voters doesn’t really allow you to reduce the number of polling stations. Reducing paper might save time and money at the count, but surely not enough to pay for doohickies.
Finally of course there’s still a risk of attack on the hardware. Someone could maybe intercept them in the post and replace them with identical-looking devices. But unlike attacking the hardware at a polling station, the attacker only affects one vote per piece of dedicated voting hardware compromised, so at least the bar is set high to begin with.