1990 standard: Before palm pilots, WWW and wireless networking
The current voluntary standard for Electronic voting systems Security Standards was an FEC document produced in 1990 as told by
this GAO review in Feb 2004 and
this one in July 2004 (PDF)
2002 standard: Scrapped
The case of the missing voting standards: Why did a 2002 effort got scrapped ?)
In 2002 as part of the HAVA effort the FEC had another Voting Systems Standard ready for review which had printing audit copies of the tabulation as a mandatory standard (1)
But it never got approved
2005: Election Assistance Commission (EAC) Voluntary Voting System Guidelines
On June 24, 2005, the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) released Voluntary Voting System Guidelines (VVSG) for public comment. The VVSG update the 2002 Voting System Standards as required by the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA). If adopted, the guidelines will become effective in October 2006.
Please review and comment the standards. The current Diebold and Triad Systems technology is based on 1950's programming technology. We can do better!
Election Assistance Commission (EAC) Voluntary Voting System Guidelines
COMMENT ON EAC VOLUNTARY VOTING SYSTEM GUIDELINES
On June 24, 2005, the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) released Voluntary Voting System Guidelines (VVSG) for public comment. The VVSG update the 2002 Voting System Standards as required by the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA). If adopted, the guidelines will become effective in October 2006.
Although the guidelines are "voluntary," they will become the de facto nationwide standard for voting technology. It's crucial that the public provide feedback on how the U.S. government and most states will regulate voting systems for many years to come. The deadline for posting comments falls within 90 days of the date the guidelines were published, or by September 21, 2005.
We look forward to your participation in this process bringing us a step closer towards a fully accessible and voter-verifiable election. Feel free to comment on any part of the guidelines. We will be reviewing everyone's comments in preparing our official comments to the EAC. We encourage you to visit the VVSG section of our blog and post your comments at:
http://www.verifiedvotingfoundation.org/blog
Soon, we'll also be releasing a VVSG action alert summarizing the main points for public comments to the EAC, so even if you don't comment on the blog, stay tuned for the alert.
Jump to comments or keep on reading
1950's programming
lawnorder: Diebold e-voting woes, Junk code, gaping security holes, ....
#define DESKEY ((des_key* "F2654hd4")
Like writing your pin on your bank card, diebold programmers hardcoded the secret key to unencrypt all voter info..
Posting unprotected source codes for a commercial product on the Web is rare and considered unspeakably stupid in the computer world, so, word spread quickly, and a computer scientist at Stanford University told Dr. Rubin... they concluded [the code] was a program compiled in 2000 and its April 2002 update, apparently posted so programmers could work on it. It was nothing less than the programming that made the voting machines voting machines.
[Rubin's] students pored over 49,609 lines of "code," .. One line blew them away. It means nothing to laymen, but it was enough to make Dr. Rubin's hair stand on end. #define DESKEY ((des_key* "F2654hd4"))... The line that staggered the Hopkins team told them first, that the method used to encrypt the Diebold machines was DES, a code that was broken in 1997 and is no longer used by anyone to secure programs. F2654hd4 was the key to the encryption.
The programmers had done the equivalent of putting the family jewels in a safe, putting up a blinking neon sign reading "Jewels in Here!" and taping the lock's combination to the safe door. Moreover, because the key was in the source code, all Diebold machines responded to the same key. Unlock one, you can unlock them all.
That was only one of the problems Dr. Rubin's team found. The computer language used to write the program, C , is never recommended for secure programs because hackers can -- and do -- attack it easily. There are other programming languages far more secure that the Diebold programmers ignored, perhaps because they didn't know them well.
Additionally, all large computer programs, which can sometimes run into the hundreds of thousands of lines, are written by teams and therefore are extensively annotated.
Whole pages of the Diebold source code were without annotations or signs of review, something you don't see on professionally written programs, he said. Some of the annotations that existed even warned that the code contained unfixed bugs. Clearly, Dr. Rubin thought, Diebold was not using the top of the class at M.I.T. to write programs for its voting machines.
The code is so badly written, Dr. Rubin shows sections to audiences at computer science conferences to get laughs.
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