All Internet voting is insecure: report By electricnews.net Posted: 23/01/2004 at 11:37 GMT
Online voting is fundamentally insecure due to the architecture of the Internet, according to leading cyber-security experts.
Using a voting system based upon the Internet poses a "serious and unacceptable risk" for election fraud and is not secure enough for something as serious as the election of government officials, according to the four members of the Security Peer Review Group, an advisory group formed by the US Department of Defense to evaluate a new on-line voting system.
The review group's members, and the authors of the damning report, include David Wagner, Avi Rubin and David Jefferson from the University of California, Berkeley, Johns Hopkins University and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, respectively, and Barbara Simons, a computer scientist and technology policy consultant.
The federally-funded Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment (SERVE) system is currently slated for use in the US in this year's primary and general elections. It will allow eligible voters to register to vote at home and then to vote via the Internet from anywhere in the world. The first tryout of SERVE is early in February for South Carolina's presidential primary and its eventual goal is to provide voting services to all eligible US citizens overseas and to US military personnel and their dependents, a population estimated at six million.
After studying the prototype system the four researchers said that from anywhere in the world a hacker could disrupt an election or influence its outcome by employing any of several common types of cyber-attacks. "Attacks could occur on a large scale and could be launched by anyone from a disaffected lone individual to a well-financed enemy agency outside the reach of US law," state the three computer science professors and a former IBM researcher in the report.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/35078.html