Election Hackers: Why Voting Technology Has to Stay Primitive | Cybersecurity Expert Kathleen Fisher

Election Hackers: Why Voting Technology Has to Stay Primitive

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Since Russia (most likely) hacked our Presidential election in 2016, there's been talk of using cell phones for voting. That's not a good idea, says security expert Kathleen Fisher. Almost all available electronic methods are in some way able to be hacked: either the machine themselves or the program counting the votes at the end. It's quite a vicious conundrum that is leaving leaders in D.C. and Silicon Valley scratching their heads. Is the good ol' paper ballot our best option? It just might be.

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KATHLEEN FISHER:

Kathleen Fisher is a Professor in and the Chair of the Computer Science Department at Tufts. Previously, she was a program manager at DARPA where she started and managed the HACMS and PPAML programs, a Consulting Faculty Member in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University, and a Principal Member of the Technical Staff at AT&T Labs Research. Kathleen's research focuses on advancing the theory and practice of programming languages and on applying ideas from the programming language community to the problem of ad hoc data management. The main thrust of her work has been in domain-specific languages to facilitate programming with massive amounts of ad hoc data. Recently, she has been exploring synergies between machine learning and programming languages and studying how to apply advances in programming languages to the problem of building more secure systems.

Kathleen is an ACM Fellow. She has served as Program Chair for OOPSLA ICFP, CUFP, and FOOL, and as General Chair for ICFP 2015. She is an Associate Editor for TOPLAS and a former editor of the Journal of Functional Programming. Kathleen is a past Chair of the ACM Special Interest Group in Programming Languages (SIGPLAN) and past Co-Chair of CRA's Committee on the Status of Women (CRA-W). Kathleen is a recipient of the SIGPLAN Distinguished Service Award. She is Vice Chair of DARPA's ISAT Study Group and a member of the Board of Trustees of Harvey Mudd College.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Kathleen Fisher: One of the reasons why computer security is so hard is because you have to get absolutely everything right in order to have a secure system. And there’s lots of different kinds of things you can get wrong. Everything from your software was buggy, your passwords were too weak, you published your passwords accidentally, your hardware was insecure, the user made a mistake and fell victim to a phishing attack and gave their credentials to a foreign agent or a bad guy. All of those things have to be done correctly in order to have a secure system.

It might seem tempting to think, you know, everybody has a cell phone so you could just use your cell phone to do voting like we do for American Idol or similar TV shows. It works for American Idol because nobody cares all that much who wins or doesn’t win.

If you get the wrong outcome some people will care, but it won’t affect sort of the future of the country, for example. It’s not sensible to use cell phones for voting for things that matter, national elections for example, because the software on a phone is enormous and very complicated, and so understanding that that code is correct and actually counting all of the votes appropriately would be a task that would be so complex as to be infeasible to do.

You could have the legitimate app that is designed to correctly count the votes for an election, but somebody could hack into that set of applications and plant bugs in a bunch of different cell phones so that the final results were not the actual intent, it didn’t actually capture the intent of all the voters.

So a system for voting that relies entirely on computers to do all of the voting will never be secure, because you’ll never have enough confidence that the code that was running on those computers correctly counted the votes as the person who voted intended. There’s always the chance that there were bugs or that a hacker came and changed the code or corrupted the code to make the result be what the hacker wanted instead of what the voters wanted.

So one of the things to know about how the U.S. election system works is that voting machines are the perview of states. So every state has their own process for deciding how what technology to use to count votes. And so it’s not, there’s not a monoculture where every single voting site has the same technology. It’s determined on the state-b...

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