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   Alexandre Oliva (lxo@gnusocial.net)'s status on Saturday, 26-Nov-2022 03:53:47 JST Alexandre Oliva

   • Ricardo B�nffy
   it's quite a relief to learn you were involved. maybe you can offer relief for another concern of mine related with the voting system.
   back when researchers carried out a successful attack on vote secrecy, finding out a way to unscramble the digital vote records starting from publicly-available information printed by each machine, voting authorities first claimed that the researchers were not attacking the real program, and then they minimized the impact because they needed access to the source code to carry out the unscrambling. that's very worrying. if the audits and security testing did not use the actual software, what purpose would they serve other than manipulation of public perception? whereas if they do use the actual software, then it follows from the second claim that the auditors (parties, public-interest organizations, security researchers), by having access to the source code, gain the ability to unscramble the voting records and thus to compromise vote secrecy. in either case, it seems to imply that the voting authorities themselves, by having access to the actual source code, can indeed compromise vote secrecy. can you offer me verifiable information that could confirm, to me and to an average voter, party member and international observer, that this is not the case, i.e., that the voting authorities are not able to compromise the secrecy of the vote through either public or nonpublic information?
   • Embed this notice
     Alexandre Oliva (lxo@gnusocial.net)'s status on Saturday, 26-Nov-2022 09:14:32 JST Alexandre Oliva

     in reply to

     • Ricardo B�nffy
     even having full access to the machines doesn't cover certain opaque sources of distrust. consider, for example, signature verification. besides the issue I've already mentioned, of difficulties (impossibilities) in telling whether a signing key has been compromised, there's the difficulty (impossibility?) of telling whether the machines are configured to accept programs signed by some specific alternate key, say for development, for configuration purposes, a vendor backdoor, etc. how would a voter or a party go about testing that, if given a chance? do you envision any way to check? assuming you agree it can't be checked, how can we trust that this possibility we can't rule out cannot possibly be abused to compromise either the whole election or the secrecy of some specific vote at some specific voting site?
   • Embed this notice
     Ricardo B�nffy (rbanffy@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 26-Nov-2022 09:14:33 JST Ricardo B�nffy

     in reply to

     @lxo the vote disclosure you mention was caused by a poorly chosen RNG seed, that allowed the attacker to duplicate the shuffling sequence of votes for that individual machine.

     That specific flaw was, AFAIK, fixed.

     As to independently verify and attack the machines, the parties and many other organizations and independent testers have access to the code and can request voting machines to be tested in realistic environments.

   • Embed this notice
     Alexandre Oliva (lxo@gnusocial.net)'s status on Sunday, 27-Nov-2022 14:57:09 JST Alexandre Oliva

     in reply to

     • Ricardo B�nffy
     yeah, those are all relevant issues, that can't be ruled out by hoping foreign states or powerful nationals interested in defrauding elections wouldn't avail themselves of.
     
     they're not even hopeless. they could be addressed if only our authorities and technicians stopped insisting that our pseudosolution is already infallible (you've already named several fundamental weaknesses in this conversation), despite deviating from what science consensus establishes as a minimum requirement for trustworthy voting systems, namely a record of votes that enables manual recounting independent from computer-based counting.
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     Ricardo B�nffy (rbanffy@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 27-Nov-2022 14:57:10 JST Ricardo B�nffy

     in reply to

     @lxo I think you should apply for access to the machines and do more research on the protocols around the voting machines - from handling to data transmission.

     There are attack vectors we can't really address - what if Intel puts malicious silicon inside the processor or the TPM? Data exfiltration by malicious code and ultrasound modulation? Once you compromise the hardware or the bootloader, anything goes.