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Military Voting System Excoriated
http://www.wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,62012,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_10
Wired News Report Page 1 of 1
10:48 AM Jan. 22, 2004 PT
WASHINGTON -- The U.S. government should abandon an Internet-voting system planned by the Pentagon because hackers could easily tamper with election results, several computer-science professors said Wednesday.
But the Pentagon is standing by the system, which could get its first test Feb. 3 in South Carolina's primary election.
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Military personnel and other U.S. citizens located overseas will be able to cast their ballots online for some primary and general elections this year under the Defense Department's Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment, or SERVE, rather than casting absentee ballots by mail.
But their votes could be vulnerable to a range of cyberattacks that already have rocked banks, Internet providers and other businesses that operate online, said four researchers who serve on an advisory panel for the program.
Hackers could knock vote-tallying computers offline with a flood of data in "denial of service" attacks; set up phony Web pages to intercept or alter votes; gather information about users; or spread a virus to participants' computers to monitor or alter their voters, the researchers said.
"Internet voting presents far too many opportunities for hackers or even terrorists to interfere with fair and accurate voting, potentially in ways impossible to detect," they said in a statement. "Such tampering could alter election results, particularly in close contests."
The risks are so great that the system should be scrapped, the researchers said.
"Because the danger of successful large-scale attacks is so great, we reluctantly recommend shutting down the development of SERVE and not attempting anything like it in the future until both the Internet and the world's home-computer infrastructure have been fundamentally redesigned, or some other unforeseen security breakthroughs appear," they said.
The Pentagon has no intention of shutting down the program, a spokesman said. "Security is enhanced, procedures are in place. I don't know them all and I wouldn't share them if I did," said Defense Department spokesman Glenn Flood.
The four security experts are among 10 the Pentagon asked to study the SERVE system and look for vulnerabilities. Flood noted the four researchers who authored the report were not joined by the six other experts who served on the advisory panel.
The report was written by Aviel Rubin of Johns Hopkins University, David Wagner of the University of California at Berkeley, David Jefferson of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and independent consultant Barbara Simons.
So far, seven states have signed on to the experimental system: Arkansas, Florida, Hawaii, North Carolina, South Carolina, Utah and Washington.
Flood said the system may be available for South Carolina expatriates to use during the upcoming primary, "but for sure it will be available for the November elections."
About 6 million U.S. voters live overseas, many of them members of the military or their relatives, Flood said. The computer experts said the SERVE system is designed to handle about 100,000 votes from the seven states.
Michigan is using a separate system for its Democratic presidential caucuses.
AP and Reuters contributed to this report.
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