Biggest Voting Machine Maker Admits — Ooops — That It Installed Remote Access Software After First Denying It (original) (raw)

from the you-guys-are-soooooooo-bad-at-this dept

We’ve been covering the mess that is electronic voting machines for nearly two decades on Techdirt, and the one thing that still flummoxes me is how are they so bad at this after all these years? And I don’t mean “bad at security” — though, that’s part of it — but I really mean “bad at understanding how insecure their machines really are.” For a while everyone focused on Diebold, but Election Systems and Software (ES&S) has long been a bigger player in the space, and had just as many issues. It just got less attention. There was even a brief period of time where ES&S bought what remained of Diebold’s flailing e-voting business before having to sell off the assets to deal with an antitrust lawsuit by the DOJ.

What’s incredible, though, is that every credible computer security person has said that it is literally impossible to build a secure fully electronic voting system — and if you must have one at all, it must have a printed paper audit trail and not be accessible from the internet. Now, as Kim Zetter at Motherboard has reported, ES&S — under questioning from Senator Ron Wyden — has now admitted that it installed remote access software on its voting machines, something the company had vehemently denied to the same reporter just a few months ago. That was then:

In a statement, ES&S said, ??None of the employees who reviewed this response, including long-tenured employees, has any knowledge that our voting systems have ever been sold with remote-access software.??

This is now:

In a letter sent to Sen. Ron Wyden in April and obtained recently by Motherboard, Election Systems and Software acknowledged that it had “provided pcAnywhere remote connection software ? to a small number of customers between 2000 and 2006,” which was installed on the election-management system ES&S sold them.

This should be a massive scandal considering the potential impact on our democracy, but considering all the other scandals going on right now with the potential to impact our democracy, expect this one to not get nearly enough attention. Wyden’s own comment on this is noteworthy:

Wyden told Motherboard that installing remote-access software and modems on election equipment ?is the worst decision for security short of leaving ballot boxes on a Moscow street corner.?

As for the pcAnywhere software ES&S had installed on those voting machines, well…

In 2006, the same period when ES&S says it was still installing pcAnywhere on election systems, hackers stole the source code for the pcAnyhere software, though the public didn?t learn of this until years later in 2012 when a hacker posted some of the source code online, forcing Symantec, the distributor of pcAnywhere, to admit that it had been stolen years earlier. Source code is invaluable to hackers because it allows them to examine the code to find security flaws they can exploit. When Symantec admitted to the theft in 2012, it took the unprecedented step of warning users to disable or uninstall the software until it could make sure that any security flaws in the software had been patched.

Around this same time, security researchers discovered a critical vulnerability in pcAnywhere that would allow an attacker to seize control of a system that had the software installed on it, without needing to authenticate themselves to the system with a password.

So… that’s disturbing.

Anyway, elections are a very tricky problem to do securely. It is a nearly impossible task. But there are lots of things that you clearly should not do, and for some reason, the e-voting manufacturers seem to want to do all of them, and don’t seem particularly apologetic about any of it. And, while in the past the idea of hacking an election may have seemed far fetched and conspiracy-minded, these days… not so much. This is a key issue concerning our democracy, and the most incredible thing is how flippant many people are about all of this. Computer security professor Matt Blaze, who knows more about any of this than anyone reading this points out that “in the more than quarter century I’ve been doing computer security, I’ve never encountered a problem space nearly as difficult or complex as civil elections.”

And yet, we’re letting people who don’t understand even the slightest bit of the problems and challenges run the show. What a mess.

Filed Under: e-voting, electronic voting, pcanywhere, remote access, remote access software, ron wyden, security, voting
Companies: diebold, es&s