Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2020 10:29:39 PDT
From: "Peter G. Neumann" <neumann@CSL.SRI.COM>
Subject: Democracy Live Internet voting: unsurprisingly insecure, and
 surprisingly insecure (Specter and Halderman, with Andrew Appel's
 comments via PGN)

A new report by Michael Specter (MIT) and Alex Halderman (U. of Michigan)
<https://internetpolicy.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/OmniBallot.pdf>
demonstrates that the OmniBallot Internet voting system from Democracy Live
<https://democracylive.com/> is fatally insecure. That by itself is not
surprising, as *no known technology* could make it secure. What is
surprising is all the /unexpected/ insecurities that Democracy Live crammed
into OmniBallot -- and the way that Democracy Live skims so much of the
voter's private information.

https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2020/06/08/democracy-live-internet-voting-unsurprisingly-insecure-and-surprisingly-insecure/

Andrew Appel <appel@princeton.edu> has posted an extremely relevant article
in Freedom-to-Tinker: https://freedom-to-tinker.com/author/appel/

 The OmniBallot Internet voting system from Democracy Live finds surprising
 new ways to be insecure, in addition to the usual (severe, fatal)
 insecurities common to all Internet voting systems.

 There's a very clear scientific consensus that ``the Internet should not
 be used for the return of marked ballots'' because ``no known technology
 guarantees the secrecy, security, and verifiability of a marked ballot
 transmitted over the Internet.''  That's from the National Academies 2018
 consensus study report <https://doi.org/10.17226/25120>, consistent with
 the May 2020 recommendations from the U.S. EAC/NIST/FBI/CISA.
 <http://s3.amazonaws.com/ftt-uploads/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/07210015/Final_-Risk_Management_for_Electronic-Ballot_05082020-1.pdf>

 [Please read the entire paper and Andrew's commentary.  They are very
 revealing, and devastating for those persons who believe that Internet
 voting can be made secure.  Every known attempt seems to have been easily
 defeated: Washington DC 2010, Estonia 2014, Australia 2015, Scytl in
 Switzerland 2019, Voatz in West Virginia 2020, OmniBallot now.  Insiders
 at any of four private companies (Democracy Live, Google, Amazon,
 Cloudflare), or any hackers who manage to hack into these companies, can
 steal votes: Democracy Live doesn't run its own servers.  PGN-excerpted]