Can you hack the vote?
A $10,000 challenge is at stake

News Story by Tom Spring in Computerworld

AUGUST 06, 2004 - Electronic voting systems have drawn fire from courts, lawmakers and citizens groups and now they're under attack by hackers.

It's an organized assault, too. E-voting technology expert Rebecca Mercuri, a Harvard research fellow who has been outspoken in her opposition to such systems, has issued a "Hack the Vote" challenge, trying to illustrate what she calls the systems' unreliability and vulnerability.

She unveiled the so-called Mercuri Challenge at the recent Black Hat Briefings and Defcon 12 security conferences.

Mercuri suggested that electronic voting machines be hacked during their pre-election testing so officials will abandon them before an actual election. "People in the election community say this technology is bulletproof," Mercuri says. "It's not."

She especially opposes use of electronic voting technology in its current state, which doesn't allow for a verifiable backup. "I'm not asking anyone to break any laws. We just want the opportunity to hack e-voting systems to prove that it can or cannot be done," she says.

Mercuri says the likeliest e-voting fraud would involve unauthorized remote access to voting machines, when a hacker manipulates results; or backdoor access to voting systems by workers with approved access but their own agenda. She described her concerns at a Defcon keynote address, "Hack the Vote."

As part of her challenge, Mercuri is calling on e-voting system vendors VoteHere Inc. and Advanced Voting Solutions to provide any challengers with "full specifications" of their voting systems for review. The first person to change vote tallies without being detected can claim $10,000 from a separate challenge.

The $10,000 is being offered by noted e-voting proponent and Carnegie Mellon University computer scientist Michael Shamos. His $10,000 bet, the Direct-Recording Electronic Hacking Challenge, contends that no one can hack into a DRE voting machine undetected.

"It is impossible to tamper with e-voting systems without being detected," he said in a telephone interview countering Mercuri's claims. Shamos says no one has ever taken him up on the challenge because, as he puts it, "the fundamental system is unhackable."

Shamos recently added another twist to his challenge. Takers must fork over $5,000 to be held in escrow for Shamos. If the contestant fails to tamper with the e-voting results undetected, Shamos keeps the $5,000.

Both Shamos and Mercuri acknowledge that they are using the same vehicle while on opposite sides of the e-vote debate. Mercuri says her public challenge is meant to draw attention to Shamos's DRE Hacking Challenge.

However, a growing number of e-voting naysayers agree with much of what Mercuri claims. For example, in April, California banned the use of touch-screen voting machines in a handful of counties until it could be proven that the systems are secure and bug-free.

Tom Mereckis, head of marketing at VoteHere, said he is "puzzled" by Mercuri's challenge because VoteHere makes full specifications of its voting systems available to anyone. "Our full source code and cryptography specs have already been published," Mereckis says. "We did answer Mercuri's challenge last month on our Web site."

Conversely, the president of Advanced Voting Solutions said he has no intention of ever releasing the proprietary workings of the company's voting systems. "We aren't interested in participating in a hacking carnival sideshow," Howard Van Pelt said. For the same reasons that American Airlines and Bank of America don't make the full specifications of their systems available to the public, Advanced Voting Solutions doesn't either, he said.

Mercuri said VoteHere forces anyone who wants to test its system to sign a restrictive licensing agreement that makes it a felony to examine its systems and share that data with the public. "That's not what we consider open and available," she said.

"There is nothing in the licensing agreement that you can't find bugs and talk about them," Mereckis said.

Prospective contestants seemed ambivalent about the e-voting hacking challenge. "Sounds like a good way to land in prison," said one Defcon attendee who declined to give his name. Other attendees said hackers are always interested in a challenge with $10,000 riding on it or not.