Experts Find Serious Problems With Switzerland's Online Voting System

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Switzerland made headlines this month for the transparency of its internet voting system when it launched a public penetration test and bug bounty program to test the resiliency of the system to attack. But after source code for the software and technical documentation describing its architecture were leaked online last week, critics are already expressing concern about the system's design and about the transparency around the public test. Cryptography experts who spent just a few hours examining the leaked code say the system is a poorly constructed and convoluted maze that makes it difficult to follow what's going on and effectively evaluate whether the cryptography and other security measures deployed in the system are done properly.

'Most of the system is split across hundreds of different files, each configured at various levels,' Sarah Jamie Lewis, a former security engineer for Amazon as well as a former computer scientist for England's GCHQ intelligence agency, told Motherboard. 'I'm used to dealing with Java code that runs across different packages and different teams, and this code somewhat defeats even my understanding.' She said the system uses cryptographic solutions that are fairly new to the field and that have to be implemented in very specific ways to make the system auditable, but the design the programmers chose thwarts this. 'It is simply not the standard we would expect,' she told Motherboard. It isn't just outside attackers that are a concern; the system raises the possibility for an insider to intentionally misconfigure the system to make it easier to manipulate, while maintaining plausible deniability that the misconfiguration was unintentional. 'Someone could wire the thing in the wrong place and suddenly the system is compromised,' said Lewis, who is currently executive director of the Open Privacy Research Society, a Canadian nonprofit that develops secure and privacy-enhancing software for marginalized communities. 'And when you're talking about code that is supposed to be protecting a national election, that is not a statement someone should be able to make.' 'You expect secure code to be defensively written that would prevent the implementers of the code from wiring it up incorrectly,' Lewis told Motherboard. But instead of building a system that doesn't allow for this, the programmers simply added a comment to their source code telling anyone who compiles and implements it to take care to configure it properly, she said. The online voting system was developed by Swiss Post, the country's national postal service, and the Barcelona-based company Scytl. 'Scytl claims the system uses end-to-end encryption that only the Swiss Electoral Board would be able to decrypt,' reports Motherboard. 'But there are reasons to be concerned about such claims.'

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