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Vulnerabilities Found in German Election Software

posted by mrpg on Sunday September 10 2017, @04:07PM   Printer-friendly
from the I'm-not-a-berliner-but-I'm-worried dept.

takyon writes:

Proprietary Software Used In German Elections Trivial To Hack, Say CCC Researchers

Security researchers from the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) have discovered that the software used to capture, aggregate, and tabulate the votes in many German elections had multiple vulnerabilities, exposing it to trivial potential attacks.

The proprietary software, called PC-Wahl, has been used to record, analyze, and present election data in national, state, and municipal elections for decades. The CCC hackers argued that the security holes are severe enough that they could jeopardize the trust in the final results of the upcoming parliamentary election (unless the security flaws are patched by then).

Also at Chaos Computer Club: Software to capture votes in upcoming national election is insecure.

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  • (Score: 2) by frojack on Sunday September 10 2017, @09:56PM (1 child)

    by frojack (1554) on Sunday September 10 2017, @09:56PM (#566042) Journal

    For the record, the right way to do this:

    Sorry. That decision is significantly above your pay grade.
    There are as many holes in your prescription as any existing methodology.

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  • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday September 11 2017, @02:03AM

    by Thexalon (636) on Monday September 11 2017, @02:03AM (#566091)

    Sorry. That decision is significantly above your pay grade.
    There are as many holes in your prescription as any existing methodology.

    OK, how about the pay grade of the most experienced election official in the United States?

    Bill Gardner, the Secretary of State of New Hampshire, has been running elections since 1976, through multiple changes of party control of state government, and his chosen methodology was a bit less strict than mine:
    - There's no purple finger marking.
    - There's no automatic hand count, only hand recounts on request.
    - Absentee ballots are still mail-in like other states.

    By all appearances, New Hampshire elections are pretty smooth affairs without much griping afterwords by the losing party about how the election itself was run. Of course, that might have something to do with the fact that being a New Hampshire legislator nets you a pay package of $100 a year, so there's not a lot of money at stake if you lose.

    --
    The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.