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The Dirty Little Secrets of Voting System Testing Labs
by Avi Rubin
 
The following URL is to a Blog by Avi Ruben. He recently attended, as 
A presenter, the California Secretary of State's Summit on voting 
Systems testing. What he reveals about the current state of the testing of
proposed voting systems is scandalous. We have repeatedly been told by
local election officials, who have been told by the vendors, that the
voting systems have been thoroughly tested by federal Independent
Testing Laboratories.
 
Avi Rubin :  Dr. Aviel D. Rubin is Professor of Computer Science and
Technical Director of the Information Security Institute at Johns
Hopkins University. Professor Rubin directs the NSF-funded ACCURATE
center for correct, usable, reliable, auditable and transparent
elections....
 
http://tinyurl.com/9cpbk
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Full text:
 
The Dirty Little Secrets of Voting System Testing Labs
Avi Rubin, 12/16/2005
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/avi-rubin/the-dirty-little-secrets-_b_12354.h
tml
 
A couple of weeks ago, I spoke at a voting system testing summit 
hosted by the Secretary of State of California, Bruce McPherson. It 
was an event that included members of the US Election Assistance 
Commission, Secretaries of State, local election officials, vendors, 
voting machine testers, representatives from NIST, social scientists 
who study voting issues, and computer scientists, such as myself.
Most notable by their absence were Wyle Laboratories and Ciber Inc. 
Let me explain.
 
Before election officials can purchase voting systems, those systems 
need to be certified by a federally accredited lab called an 
Independent Testing Authority (ITA). There are three such labs in 
the US: Ciber, Wyle Labs, and Systest. These labs are tasked with 
testing any proposed voting systems against federal standards, in 
this case, the 2002 federal standards, soon to be replaced by the 
2005 voluntary voting system guidelines (VVSG). You would think that 
these labs would be very interested in attending a summit such as 
this, and in fact, they were all invited. Only Systest showed up.
 
There were several overriding themes that emerged at the voting 
systems testing summit. Perhaps the most prevalent one was that the 
ITAs consistently decline to appear at these meetings. Why? Well the 
main reason is that they are fraught with conflict of interest and 
incompetence. In fact, had they shown up, they would have been raked 
over the coals by some of the voting system examiners that attended 
the summit. For instance, an examiner from Pennsylvania wanted to 
know how come so many systems that passed the ITA testing still had 
serious security and even operational flaws. The Systest 
representative, who had the misfortune of representing his entire 
industry alone, replied that they were only required to test against 
the standard. When pressed about whether or not the ITAs would fail 
a system if a serious flaw was found, the reply was that a memo 
would be written, but that the system would still pass. I couldn't 
believe it. The company that was tasked with certifying machines for
  elections in the United States would still pass them, even if a 
 serious flaw was found, as long as the machine did not violate any 
 aspects of the standard. Unbelievable.
 
Now, let me talk a bit about the conflict of interest. As a friend 
of mine put it, the ITAs are not independent and they have no 
authority. So Independent Testing Authority is a misnomer. 
Thankfully, NIST is going to change the name next year. Here's where 
it gets bad. The ITAs are hired by and paid by -- the vendors. That 
is, when a vendor has a voting machine that they want certified, 
they find an ITA who is willing to certify the voting machine. Any 
memos about flaws that are discovered remain confidential. There is 
no requirement to disclose any problems that are found with the 
machines. In fact, the entire ITA report is considered proprietary 
information of the voting machine vendor. After all, they paid for 
it. This provides an incentive for ITAs to certify machines, to 
satisfy their clients.
 
Two years ago, my research team got our hands on the code that runs 
inside of Diebold's Accuvote machines. We performed a source code 
analysis and reported all kinds of serious security problems (see 
http://avirubin.com/vote/analysis/). It was incredible to me that 
such machines were actually deployed and used in elections. Equally 
confounding was that a national testing lab, in this case Wyle Labs, 
actually certified this machine. Either they did not know the first 
thing about cryptography and security, or they did not look at the 
source code. In fact, according to the 2002 standards, they were not 
required to examine the code.
 
So, the current state of affairs is grim. The ITA model provides an 
incentive to certify bad systems, and clearly such systems are being 
certified all the time. When the ITAs find a serious problem, it is 
relayed, confidentially to the vendor, and the only thing that the 
public ever learns is that a machine was certified. If a machine is 
not certified, nobody ever learns about it. The ITAs are aware 
enough of how broken the system is that they mostly hide from public 
events where they might be taken to task.
 
Here's how I would reform the system. First off, I would have all 
the vendors pay a tax to NIST. NIST would then hire real independent 
testers to examine any voting machine proposed by a vendor. The 
testers would be paid more for finding problems with the machines 
than for certifying them. Thus, you can be sure that the testers 
tried every way of failing a machine before passing it. Everything 
done by the testers, every test performed, as well as the result, 
would be public. Occasionally, to keep the testers on their toes, 
NIST would throw a machine at the testers with a known serious 
problem, just to see if the testers could find it, and testers who 
did not find the problem would be penalized. The whole process would 
be open and transparent to the public. I doubt systems such as the 
2003 Diebold Accuvote would have ever made it to a polling station 
in that model.
 
I learned a lot at the voting system testing summit, and I applaud 
Secretary McPherson for the dialogue that he opened up. I sincerely 
hope that in such events in the future, there will be no 
stakeholders who are afraid or ashamed to show their faces.