bugtraq - Re: Diebold Global Election Management System (GEMS) Backdoor Account Allows Authenticated Users to Modify Votes

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Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2004 21:56:49 -0400
From: Adam Shostack <adam@...eport.org>
To: David Schwartz <davids@...master.com>
Cc: bugtraq@...urityfocus.com
Subject: Re: Diebold Global Election Management System (GEMS) Backdoor Account    Allows Authenticated Users to Modify Votes

On Tue, Sep 28, 2004 at 12:01:41PM -0700, David Schwartz wrote:
| 
| > Second, to those of us as above, they provide confidence only to the
| > extent that we trust the code being run (which at the least requires
| > it to run on our own computers, and preferably is written by us; I'd
| > trust code I wrote, even though it might have bugs; I'd trust code
| > Bruce wrote, because I know and trust him.  I'd trust, to a lesser
| > degree, code that Bruce vetted, because I know how hard it is to
| > examine code and how easy it is to slip something in that's very hard
| > to find.)
| 
| 	This criticism is not correct. The whole point of cryptographically-secure
| voting systems is that you *don't* have to trust the code being run. If your

Of course you have to trust code being run.  The code could be telling
you that it's running some Chaumian scheme for vote counting, and
actually be running Diebold code underneath.  What?  Your
visually-crypted reciept didn't verify?  Some sort of bug, sorry.

In other schemes, other code needs trusting to handle private keys, to
distribute the results, etc.  And in the end, are people who can't
handle a butterfly ballot going to understand and trust crypto?

Adam