If a vendor did a proper job of constructing a machine that conformed to
the VVAT spec, then open source would not be required *at all*. The
voter gets to verify the paper ballot before it is deposted in the
ballot box, and external oververs can physically inspect the ballot box
and the discard box to ensure that the right number of ballots are
deposited into each box.
OTOH, if the machine does *not* conform to the VVAT spec, then open
source is no where near sufficient to assure fair balloting, because the
vendor could supply source code all over the place, and then just
install trojan code at the last moment.
And that is the fundamental problem with all-electronic (no paper trail)
voting: a human observer on the outside cannot tell what is going on in
the chips and disks. You can get all the tripwire/opensource/checksum
report crap you want, but if a bad guy got access to the machine and
installed a trojan, then your reports are all a pack of lies, and no
amout of election observing by anyone will help.
That is why the VVAT isn the one and only answer to fair digital voting.
Open source is a distraction.
Crispin
Paul Wouters wrote:
Free enterprise is not the issue here. Audit trails are. If it means that
somewhere someone cannot make a profit, then so be it. Unless you declare
democracy dead, and instate the Corporate Republic. The 'free market'
should not be a main consideration in voting security. If you cannot
relay
that message to your government, then either you or your government is
not
the right one for its task.
the VVPAT groups with the open source community. So rather than putting
your energy into trying to get Diebold et al to move to open source, it
Diebold has proven to not earn the trust of the public. It deserves to
lose
money, or even go bankrupt. That's capitalism. You screw up and your
product
no longer sells and you go do something else. Perhaps Diebold can go into
the playing cards business.
(3) WRT requiring that the technology protect itself in case the users
don't, that's simply unrealistic. In *any* real computer system,
there are
expectations about the environment (e.g., the administrators aren't
hostile
to the functioning of the system). It's important to state what those
expectations are, but there will ALWAYS be some that rely on
non-technical
means. The important part about election systems is that they be
explicitly
stated, and they be enforceable using non-technical means (e.g., by
having
locks on doors). The problem today is that some of the assumptions
(e.g.,
the vendor provided software doesn't have any bugs) are clearly
unrealistic.
We are talking about voting machines here, not general purpose
operating systems! They should be able to restrict and properly (and
provably!) secure a reasonably simple dedicated single purpose voting
computer.
(4) WRT getting one set of software approved, and then installing
another...
that's an old problem in any environment. The way it's supposed to
work in
election systems is that a particular version is approved, and it's
illegal
for the vendor to install something different. If there are teeth in
the
law, and the vendor can be fined for installing illegal software,
then it's
A fine? No. They just be blacklisted from ever supplying voting
machines to
the government again. Screwing up elections is not like hitting a red
light
when there is nobody around.
Bottom line, election systems are no different than any other systems in
that the security of the whole system is based on risk management.
But I guess no one trusts the US government itself anymore if even Europe
is sending officials to watch over the elections:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3666898.stm
And to counter your arguments, the Netherlands has open sourced its
voting
system. You can download and verify it at http://www.ososs.nl/
Paul
--
Crispin Cowan, Ph.D. http://immunix.com/~crispin/
CTO, Immunix http://immunix.com
