Please try the URL privacy information feature enabled by clicking the flashlight icon above. This will reveal two icons after each link the body of the digest. The shield takes you to a breakdown of Terms of Service for the site - however only a small number of sites are covered at the moment. The flashlight take you to an analysis of the various trackers etc. that the linked site delivers. Please let the website maintainer know if you find this useful or not. As a RISKS reader, you will probably not be surprised by what is revealed…
Kathryn Brenzel/NJ.com, 26 Jun 2014 http://www.nj.com/passaic-county/index.ssf/2014/06/nj_transit_train_strikes_car_in_clifton_after_gps_leads_woman_onto_tracks.html A New Jersey Transit train struck a Volvo in Clifton NJ on Wednesday after a woman—misdirected by her GPS—drove and got stuck on the tracks, agency officials said. [Presumably the GPS-based navigator said Turn (L or R) “at the next intersection,'' not “at the next set of railroad tracks.'' It is perhaps surprising that this does happen, but not clear where the blame should lie. PGN]
(A remarkably stupid flaw. Thanks to Drew Dean for noting it) Running Cisco Unified Comms: Four words you don't want to hear: `Backdoor SSH root key' *The Register*, 2 Jul 2014 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/07/02/cisco_you_cant_just_leave_your_ssh_keys_lying_around/ "The vulnerability is due to the presence of a default SSH private key, which is stored in an insecure way on the system." http://tools.cisco.com/security/center/content/CiscoSecurityAdvisory/cisco-sa-20140702-cucdm
Will Oremus, *Slate*, 30 Jun 2014 (via Dave Farber) http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/06/30/google_glass_banned_from_uk_movie_theaters_out_of_misplaced_piracy_fears.html Cinemas across the United Kingdom are banning Google Glass the *Independent* reports, out of fear that people will use it to surreptitiously record and pirate movies. <http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/google-glass-to-be-banned-from-all-uk-cinemas-9570686.html>, The fiat comes from the Cinema Exhibitors' Association, a trade group. “Customers will be requested not to wear these into cinema auditoriums, whether the film is playing or not,'' said Phil Clapp, the group's chief executive. It isn't just the Brits who are cracking down on Google's high-tech specs. Earlier this year a Glass-wearer was hauled out of an AMC theater and interrogated by FBI agents in Columbus, Ohio. He explained to the agents that he couldn't just take the device off, because it was attached to his prescription lenses. That apparently didn't stop them from detaining him for an hour and going through all his photos and personal data. <http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/01/22/google_glass_at_the_movies_prompts_fbi_interrogation.html> It should be apparent to anyone who has ever used Google Glass that the paranoia is unwarranted. The device can record video, but the quality is low, and the audio quality is even worse. And it can only record for 30 to 45 minutes before the battery runs out. More importantly, as I explained last year when I called Google Glass `the world's worst surveillance device' there's a red light on the front of the device that blinks on and stays lit whenever it's recording. In a pitch-dark theater, surreptitiousness is pretty much out of the question. <http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2013/05/google_glass_privacy_it_s_actually_the_world_s_worst_surveillance_device.html>, In a statement about the U.K. cinema ban, Google is saying pretty much the same thing. “Broadly speaking, we think it's best to have direct and first-hand experience with Glass before creating policies around it,'' a spokesman said, semi-diplomatically. “The fact that Glass is worn above the eyes and the screen lights up whenever it's activated makes it a fairly lousy device for recording things secretly.'' You know what does records audio and video in higher quality, doesn't have a bright red light on the front, and could capture an entire movie? The smartphones that just about everyone carries into theaters these days. Google Glass might be newer and therefore scarier to people than smartphones, but there's no good reason it should be treated differently in a movie theater. Moviegoers wearing prescription Glass should simply turn their face-computers off before the film starts, the same way they do with their pocket-computers. And for those with non-prescription Glass, this shouldn't even be an issue: You don't need the Cinema Exhibitors' Association to tell you that you'll be able to see the movie better without an extra screen stuck to your head.
FYI—It's time to start using theorem provers on *all* code; if you can't
convince the theorem prover re buffer overflows, you'll have to insert
executable code to explicitly check. HB
Thursday, June 26, 2014
Raising Lazarus - The 20 Year Old Bug that Went to Mars
http://blog.securitymouse.com/2014/06/raising-lazarus-20-year-old-bug-that.html
It's rare that you come across a bug so subtle that it can last for two
decades. But, that's exactly what has happened with the
Lempel-Ziv-Oberhumer (LZO) algorithm. Initially written in 1994, Markus
Oberhumer designed a sophisticated and extremely efficient compression
algorithm so elegant and well architected that it outperforms zlib and bzip
by four or five times their decompression speed.
As a result, Markus has made a successful and well deserved career out of
optimizing code for various platforms. I was impressed to find out that his
LZO algorithm has gone to the planet Mars on NASA devices multiple times!
Most recently, LZO has touched down on the red planet within the Mars
Curiosity Rover, which just celebrated its first martian anniversary on
Tuesday.
Because of the speed and efficiency of the algorithm, LZO has made its way
into both proprietary and open source projects world-wide. It's has lived
in automotive systems, airplanes, and other embedded systems for over a
decade. The algorithm has even made its way into projects we use on a daily
basis, such as OpenVPN, MPlayer2, Libav, FFmpeg, the Linux kernel, Juniper
Junos, and much, much, more.
In the past few years, LZO has gained traction in file systems as well. LZO
can be used in the Linux kernel within btrfs, squashfs, jffs2, and ubifs. A
recent variant of the algorithm, LZ4, is used for compression in ZFS for
Solaris, Illumos, and FreeBSD.
LZO is even enabled in kernels for Samsung Android devices to increase
kernel loading speed and improve the user experience, as noted in the
Android Hacker's Handbook.
With its popularity increasing, Lempel-Ziv-Oberhumer has been rewritten by
many engineering firms for both closed and open systems. These rewrites,
however, have always been based on Oberhumer's core open source
implementation. As a result, they all inherited a subtle integer overflow.
Even LZ4 has the same exact bug, but changed very slightly.
Engineered Genetics
Code reuse is a normal part of engineering, and is something we do every
day. But, it can be dangerous. By reusing code that is known to work well,
especially in highly optimized algorithms, projects can become subject to
vulnerabilities in what is perceived as trusted code. Auditing highly
optimized algorithms is a fragile endeavor. It is very easy to break these
types of algorithms. Therefore, reused code that is highly specialized is
often presumed safe because of its age, its proven efficiency, and its
fragility.
This creates a sort of digital DNA, a digital genetic footprint that can be
traced over time. Though there are certainly many instances of proprietary
variants of LZO and LZ4, the following six implementations are available in
open source software
Oberhumer LZO (core/reference open source implementation)
Linux kernel's LZO implementation
Libav's LZO implementation
FFmpeg's LZO implementation
Linux kernel's LZ4 implementation
LZ4 core/reference implementation
Despite each implementation of the algorithm being noticeably different,
each variant is vulnerable in the exact same way. Let's take a look at a
version of the algorithm that is easy to read online, the Linux kernel
implementation found here.
In all variants of LZ[O4], the vulnerability occurs when processing a
Literal Run. This is a chunk of compressed data that isn't compressed at
all. Literals are uncompressed bytes that the user decided, for whatever
reason, should not be compressed. A Literal Run is signaled by a state
machine in LZO, and by a Mask in LZ4.
56 if (likely(state == 0)) {
57 if (unlikely(t == 0)) {
58 while (unlikely(*ip == 0)) {
59 t += 255;
60 ip++;
61 NEED_IP(1);
62 }
63 t += 15 + *ip++;
64 }
65 t += 3;
In the above sample, the integer overflow is evident. The variable 't' is
incremented by 255 every time the compression payload contains a nil byte
(0x00) when a Literal Run is detected. Regardless of whether the variable
't' is signed or unsigned, 255 will be added to it. The only check is to
ensure that the input buffer contains another byte. This means that 't' can
accumulate until it is a very large unsigned integer. If 't' is a 32bit
integer, it only takes approximately sixteen (16) megabytes of zeroes to
generate a sufficiently large value for 't'. Though 't' can overflow here,
this is not where the attack occurs. There is another more important
overflow just below this chunk of code.
66 copy_literal_run:
67 #if defined(CONFIG_HAVE_EFFICIENT_UNALIGNED_ACCESS)
68 if (likely(HAVE_IP(t + 15) && HAVE_OP(t + 15))) {
69 const unsigned char *ie = ip + t;
70 unsigned char *oe = op + t;
71 do {
72 COPY8(op, ip);
73 op += 8;
74 ip += 8;
75 COPY8(op, ip);
76 op += 8;
77 ip += 8;
78 } while (ip < ie);
79 ip = ie;
80 op = oe;
81 } else
82 #endif
Above, we see the "copy_literal_run" chunk of code. This is the section of
the LZO algorithm that uses the variable 't' as a size parameter. On line
68, the code ensures that the input buffer (IP) and output buffer (OP) are
large enough to contain 't' bytes. However, in the Linux kernel
implementation, they pad by 15 bytes to ensure the 16 byte copy does not
overflow either buffer. This is where things fail.
The macros HAVE_IP and HAVE_OP validate that 't' bytes are available in the
respective buffer. But, before the macro is called, the expression (t + 15)
is evaluated. If the value of 't' is large enough, this expression will
cause an integer overflow. The attacker can make this expression result in
a value of zero (0) through fourteen (14) by forcing 't' to equal the values
-15 to -1, respectively. This means that the HAVE macros will always
believe that enough space is available in both input and output buffers.
On line 70, the pointer 'oe' will now point to before the 'op' buffer,
potentially pointing to memory prior to the start of the output buffer. The
subsequent code will copy sixteen (16) bytes from the input pointer to the
output pointer, which does nothing as these pointers should point to a
"safe" location in memory. However, there are two side effects here that
the attacker must abuse: lines 78 and 80.
Because 'ie' will always have an address lower in memory than 'ip', the loop
is immediately broken after the first sixteen (16) byte copy. This means
that the value 't' did not cause a crash in the copy loop, making this copy
essentially a no-op from the attacker's point of view. Most importantly, on
line 80 (and 79), the buffer pointer is set to the overflown pointer. This
means that now, the output pointer points to memory outside of the bounds of
the output buffer. The attacker now has the capability to corrupt memory,
or at least cause a Denial of Service (DoS) by writing to an invalid memory
page.
The Impact of Raising Dead Code
Each variant of the LZO and LZ4 implementation is vulnerable in slightly
different ways. The attacker must construct a malicious payload to fit each
particular implementation. One payload cannot be used to trigger more than
a DoS on each implementation. Because of the slightly different overflow
requirements, state machine subtleties, and overflow checks that must be
bypassed, even a worldwide DoS is not a simple task.
This results in completely different threats depending on the implementation
of the algorithm, the underlying architecture, and the memory layout of the
target application. Remote Code Execution (RCE) is possible on multiple
architectures and platforms, but absolutely not all. Denial of Service is
possible on most implementations, but not all. Adjacent Object Over-Write
(OOW) is possible on many architectures.
Lazarus raised from the dead
Because the LZO algorithm is considered a library function, each specific
implementation must be evaluated for risk, regardless of whether the
algorithm used has been patched. Why? We are talking about code that has
existed in the wild for two decades. The scope of this algorithm touches
everything from embedded microcontrollers on the Mars Rover, mainframe
operating systems, modern day desktops, and mobile phones. Engineers that
have used LZO must evaluate the use case to identify whether or not the
implementation is vulnerable, and in what format.
Here is a list of impact based on each library. Implementations, or use
cases of each library may change the threat model enough to warrant
reclassification. So, please have a variant audited by a skilled third
party, such as <shameless plug>.
Oberhumer LZO
RCE: Impractical
DoS: Practical
OOW: Practical
NOTE: 64bit platforms are impractical for all attacks
Linux kernel LZO
RCE: Impractical
DoS: Practical
OOW: Practical
NOTE: Only i386/PowerPC are impacted at this time
Libav LZO
RCE: Practical
DoS: Practical
OOW: Practical
NOTE: ALL ARCHITECTURES/PLATFORMS are RCE capable
FFmpeg LZO
RCE: Practical
DoS: Practical
OOW: Practical
NOTE: ALL ARCHITECTURES/PLATFORMS are RCE capable
Linux kernel LZ4
RCE: Practical
DoS: Practical
OOW: Practical
NOTE: 64bit architectures are NOT considered practical
LZ4
RCE: Practical
DoS: Practical
OOW: Practical
NOTE: 64bit architectures are NOT considered practical
For a bug report on each implementation, please visit the Lab Mouse
Security's vulnerability site.
How Do You Know If You're Vulnerable
Projects Using LZO/LZ4
The easiest way to identify whether your specific implementation is
vulnerable is to determine the maximum chunk size that is passed to the
decompress routine. If buffers of sixteen (16) megabytes or more can be
passed to the LZO or LZ4 decompress routine in one call, then exploitation
of the integer overflow is possible. For example, ZFS constrains buffer
sizes to 128k. So, even though they use a vulnerable implementation of LZ4,
an attack is not possible without a second bug to bypass the buffer size
constraint.
The second easiest way is to identify the bit size of the count variable.
If the count variable (for example, named 't' in the Linux kernel code shown
above) is 64bit, it would take such a massive amount of data to trigger the
overflow that the attack would likely be infeasible, regardless of how much
data can be passed to the vulnerable function in one call. This is due to
the fact that even modern computers do not have enough RAM available to
store the data required to implement such an attack.
However, there is a specific issue with the previous check. Validate that
even if the count variable is 64bit in size, the value used is still 64bit
when a length value is checked. If the actual length value is truncated to
32bits, the attack will still work with only sixteen (16) megabytes of data.
Users
All users of FFmpeg, Libav, and projects that depend on them, should
consider themselves at risk to remote code execution. Period. Please
update your software from the FFmpeg and Libav websites, or refrain from
using these applications until your distribution has an adequate patch.
It should be noted that certain Linux distributions package Mplayer2 with
the base system by default. MPlayer2 is vulnerable to RCE "out of the box".
If your distribution packages MPlayer2 by default, be sure to disable the
embedded media player plugin (gecko-mediaplayer) for your browser.
Firefox/Iceweasel, Chromium, Opera, Konqueror, and other Linux-based
browsers are vulnerable to RCE regardless of the platform/architecture when
an MPlayer2 plugin is enabled.
Vendor Status
Lab Mouse has reached out to and worked with each vendor of the vulnerable
algorithm. As of today, June 26th, 2014, all LZO vendors have patches
either available online, or will later today. Please update as soon as
possible to minimize the existing threat surface.
In the near future, Lab Mouse will publish a more technical blog on why and
how RCE is possible using this bug. We consider that information to be
imperative for both auditors and engineers, as it assists in identifying,
classifying, and prioritizing a threat. However, that report will be
released once the patches have been widely distributed for a sufficient
amount of time.
For more information, please visit our contact page. We are more than happy
to help your team with their use case, or implementation of these
algorithms.
Summary
Overall, this is how this bug release breaks down.
Vendors have patches ready or released
Distributions have been notified
Vendors of proprietary variants have been notified (where they could be found)
All bug reports can be found here
RCE is not only possible but practical on all Libav/FFmpeg based projects
All others are likely impractical to RCE, but still possible given a
sufficiently skilled attacker
It is always exciting to uncover a vulnerability as subtle as this issue,
especially one that has persisted and propagated for two decades. But, it
makes me pause and consider the way we look at engineering as a model.
Speed and efficiency are imperatives for modern projects. We're building
technology that touches our lives like never before. I know that most
engineers strive to build not only elegant, but safe code. But, we still
see security as a disparate discipline from engineering. Security and
engineering could not be more tightly bound. Without engineering, you can't
provide security to users. Without security, engineering cannot provide a
stable and provable platform.
Neil deGrasse Tyson famously claimed, God is in the gaps. There is a
similar issue in engineering. The individual often sees stability where the
individual doesn't have expertise. Our God is the algorithm. We "bless"
certain pieces of code because we don't have the time or knowledge to
evaluate it. When we, as engineers and analysts, take that perspective, we
are doing a disservice to the people that use our projects and services.
Often the best eyes are fresh or untrained eyes. The more we stop telling
ourselves to step over the gaps in our code bases, the more holes we'll be
able to fill. All it takes is one set of eyes to find a vulnerability,
there is no level of expertise required to look and ask questions. Just
look. Maybe you'll find the next 20 year old vulnerability.
Thanks
I'd like to thank the following people for their great assistance patching,
coordinating, and advising on this issue:
Greg Kroah-Hartman (Linux)
Linus Torvalds (Linux)
Kees Cook (Google)
Xin LI (FreeBSD)
Michael Niedermayer (FFmpeg)
Luca Barbato (Libav/Gentoo)
Markus Oberhumer
Christopher J. Dorros (NASA MSL)
Dan McDonald (Omniti)
Yves-Alexis Perez (Debian)
Kurt Seifried (Red Hat)
Willy Tarreau (Linux)
Solar Designer (Openwall)
The US-CERT team
The Oracle security team
The GE security team
Kelly Jackson Higgins (UBM)
Steve Ragan (IDG Enterprise)
Elinor Mills
Feeling Guilty?
Are you reading this post, thinking about all the administrators and
engineers that are going to have to patch the LZO/LZ4 issue in your team's
systems? Take some time to tell them how you feel with our hand crafted Lab
Mouse Security custom Sympathy Card!
Hand crafted with the finest bits and bytes, our Sympathy Card shows your
engineer what they mean to you and your team. This is a limited run of
cards, and will proudly display the Linux kernel LZO exploit written by Lab
Mouse on the card.
Best wishes,
Don A. Bailey, Founder / CEO, @InfoSecMouse, Lab Mouse Security, 26 Jun 2014
FYI—With all of the GUI/scripting hacks out there, it is refreshing to see that old-fashioned command-line hacks can still pack a fatal punch. In this article, Leon Juranic shows how deliberately ill-chosen filenames can be used to do very unpleasant things. "BusyBox"-based routers, beware! "Unix Wildcards Gone Wild" http://www.defensecode.com/public/DefenseCode_Unix_WildCards_Gone_Wild.txt
Houston Astros release statement on security breach, MLB.com, 30 Jun 2014 "Last month, we were made aware that proprietary information held on Astros' servers and in Astros' applications had been illegally obtained. Upon learning of the security breach, we immediately notified MLB security who, in turn, notified the FBI. Since that time, we have been working closely with MLB security and the FBI to the determine the party, or parties, responsible. This information was illegally obtained and published, and we intend to prosecute those involved to the fullest extent. "It is unfortunate and extremely disappointing that an outside source has illegally obtained confidential information. While it does appear that some of the content released was based on trade conversations, a portion of the material was embellished or completely fabricated." http://mlb.mlb.com/news/article/mlb/astros-release-statement-on-security-breach?ymd=20140630&content_id=82394046
Anne Flaherty | Associated Press, 1 JUL 2014 T-Mobile US knowingly made hundreds of millions of dollars off its customers in potentially bogus charges, federal regulators alleged Tuesday in the first lawsuit of its kind against a wireless provider. The lawsuit by the Federal Trade Commission, which fueled a separate federal investigation, demands that T-Mobile refund the money to consumers for subscriptions to premium text services such as $10-per-month horoscopes that were never authorized by the account holder. The FTC alleges that T-Mobile collected as much as 40 percent of the charges, even after being alerted by other customers that the subscriptions were scams. ... http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2014/07/01/ftc-accuses-mobile-knowingly-billing-customers-for-hundreds-millions-bogus-charges/vlB5kH1WlGrfxO6f0LiycJ/story.html http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2014/07/01/ftc-accuses-mobile-fraud-billing/NwP31CnyYhn5CTuTQuj8BL/story.html Jon Brodkin, Ars Technica, 1 Jul 2014 US sues T-Mobile, says carrier made millions off "bogus" cramming fees FTC: T-Mobile buried SMS charges in 50-page bills, should pay back victims. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/07/us-sues-t-mobile-says-carrier-made-millions-off-bogus-cramming-fees/
Users of Facebook and other free social media and search platforms are not aware of the extent that personalization algorithms for ads and content serve the interest of the platform and are at odds with their own interests. This article reviews a series of examples that demonstrate that the Facebook news feed and its associated ads produce damaging, bizarre and unpleasant effects when functioning as designed. These include (1) false statements about your attitudes are shown to your friends, (2) communications from your friends and family are more likely to be shown to you when they contain a reference to Coke, Levi's, or Anheuser Busch products, (3) Facebook indicates that your friends and family who have died "like" current events, (4) the Facebook interface appears to be designed to conceal the fact that some of these things are happening—probably because you would object to them—and more. Corrupt Personalization http://socialmediacollective.org/2014/06/26/corrupt-personalization/ <http://bit.ly/1jnlluM>
*The Atlantic* via NNSquad, Jun 2014 http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/even-the-editor-of-facebooks-mood-study-thought-it-was-creepy/373649/ "And yet there's something new-level creepy about a recent study that shows Facebook manipulated what users saw when they logged into the site as a way to study how it would affect their moods." - - - If this isn't enough to get you off of Facebook, frankly I don't know what is.
Vindu Goel, *The New York Times* 30 Jun 2014, via NNSquad http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/technology/facebook-tinkers-with-users-emotions-in-news-feed-experiment-stirring-outcry.html?partner=rss&emc=3Drss "Although academic protocols generally call for getting people's consent before psychological research is conducted on them, Facebook didn't ask for explicit permission from those it selected for the experiment. It argued that its 1.28 billion monthly users gave blanket consent to the company's research as a condition of using the service. But the social network's manipulation of its users' feelings without their knowledge stirred up its own negative reaction. Some Facebook users and critics suggested that the company had crossed an ethical boundary." - - - I've been over the lengthy "Data Usage" section of the Facebook TOS a half dozen times since this story broke. I frankly don't see how any reasonable person could read that and believe that it gave permission for the sort of outside-partnered psychological manipulation experiment as in this case.
https://www.noip.com/blog/2014/06/30/ips-formal-statement-microsoft-takedown/ We want to update all our loyal customers about the service outages that many of you are experiencing today. It is not a technical issue. This morning, Microsoft served a federal court order and seized 22 of our most commonly used domains because they claimed that some of the subdomains have been abused by creators of malware. We were very surprised by this. We have a long history of proactively working with other companies when cases of alleged malicious activity have been reported to us. Unfortunately, Microsoft never contacted us or asked us to block any subdomains, even though we have an open line of communication with Microsoft corporate executives. We have been in contact with Microsoft today. They claim that their intent is to only filter out the known bad hostnames in each seized domain, while continuing to allow the good hostnames to resolve. However, this is not happening. Apparently, the Microsoft infrastructure is not able to handle the billions of queries from our customers. Millions of innocent users are experiencing outages to their services because of Microsoft's attempt to remediate hostnames associated with a few bad actors. Had Microsoft contacted us, we could and would have taken immediate action. Microsoft now claims that it just wants to get us to clean up our act, but its draconian actions have affected millions of innocent Internet users. - - - Nice work Microsoft. With friends like you, innocent customers don't need enemies. Maybe some infrastructure planning next time before you go running off to the courts to take over domains? Hmm?
Microsoft returns most domains it improperly confiscated, which cut off ser= vice to millions Ars Technica via NNSquad http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/07/order-restored-to-universe-as-microsoft-surrenders-confiscated-no-ip-domains/ "These draconian actions, however, should be taken only as a last resort. Microsoft has yet to respond to No-IP allegations that no one at Microsoft ever privately complained of the abuse. It that's true, it's hard to conclude this episode wasn't an overreach and a gross abuse of the legal process."
Overnight I lost contact with some hardware of mine in Minnesota. Turns out Microsoft cut me off and I don't even use any Microsoft products. I don't fully understand, but it seems that if Microsoft doesn't think third parties are being sufficiently helpful in assisting Microsoft's battle with the malware that infects Microsoft products, Microsoft will mumbo-jumbo a judge to get you shutdown. In this case it seems my dynamic DNS service, no-ip.org, wasn't helpful enough to Microsoft's efforts. http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_blog/archive/2014/06/30/microsoft-takes-on-global-cybercrime-epidemic-in-tenth-malware-disruption.aspx -kb, the Kent who sometimes softens to MS a little but then is reminded by something like this why he hates them so.
> One has to wonder real a threat this might be. Yes, it's a nice movie of > the week plot but it really doesn't make a lot of sense in that it > influences exactly one vote which would rarely be decisive. You're really not thinking big enough about the scope at which election fraud can, and does, take place, and can, and does, influence the outcome of elections. For example, in many faux democracies, this takes the form of members of the dominant party's goon squad visiting voters at home, one by one, and offering to save them the trouble of going to the polls by voting for them. The people confronted in this way—in their home, by big, burly supporters of the party in power—know that voting for the opposition is not an option, both because of the personal repercussions they would face for doing so, and because even if they were to give the goon squad a ballot for the opposition, it would magically transform into a ballot for the dominant party on the way to the ballot box. Allowing voting by mail or online makes this kind of intimidation that much easier. This kind of fraud can, and does, change the outcome of elections. On the original question of whether this is a "fatal" flaw, there are ways to make this kind of intimidation far less practical, e.g., by allowing voters to revoke and replace their votes for some period of time after they are registered. Whether these measures would make online voting sufficiently more secure to justify using it is an open question, especially given how many other serious issues there are with making online voting systems reliable and secure enough.
>> No way to make sure the voter isn't selling their vote (drugs, sex, >> alcohol, money...). . . . > > While this is certainly execrable, again, can it be done on a large enough > scale to dictate a result? It surely can. Think of a factory town, where a significant number of voters are working for the same company. During election time, the company sets up voting booths where employees can vote by Internet on company's workstations during working hours—for workers' convenience, of course. In such a situation, even if workers are sure the company cannot peek who they are voting for, they'd surely get the message and vote for, e.g., candidates who would not enforce environmental regulations to severely.
Christian Huitema <huitema@microsoft.com> wrote: > In practice, we do not observe more fraud in Washington State than > in other places that stuck with traditional ballots. THAT, my friend, is exactly the problem. The kinds of fraud that have plagued elections in the past, have had protections against them installed. For example: Voting officials are instructed to look out for people who might be coerced by others to vote in a certain way. Or someone coming in multiple times in behalf of others. Those protections were put in place for a reason: they have posed a problem in the past. With mail or Internet voting, those kinds of fraud become difficult or impossible to detect and observe. So, yes, you have not observed more fraud than with traditional ballots. R.E.Wolff@BitWizard.nl ** http://www.BitWizard.nl/ ** +31-15-2600998 ** Delftechpark 26 2628 XH Delft, The Netherlands. KVK: 27239233 **
> a) The amount of effort required to understand (and subsequently change > in a meaningful and non-disruptive way) somebody else's code is 80% of > that of writing your own from scratch. With a codebase size of mozilla's > that a plain crack pipe dream. This is hard to digest. I have always found that changing something that was somewhat similar to what I needed was a lot easier than starting from scratch. And I have changed wireshark, which I guess is in the order of magnitude of code complexity of firefox in a couple of weeks work. That hardly accounts for 80% of the total. 1% may be ? Carlos G Mendioroz <tron@huapi.ba.ar> LW7 EQI Argentina
Dimitri Maziuk wrote: > a) The amount of effort required to understand (and subsequently > change in a meaningful and non-disruptive way) somebody else's code > is 80% of that of writing your own from scratch. With a codebase > size of mozilla's that a plain crack pipe dream. Consider a project with three authors, each contributing 1/3 of the effort: the above proposition is obviously false, since 1/3 < 0.8*2/3. In large open source projects with hundreds of authors, the time spent on the smallest contribution is a tiny fraction of a percent of the total effort. To fix a bug or to implement a small feature, one does not need to understand all the code. Usually, a few minutes of find and grep is enough to find the place to edit and a little more to create the fix. Even the knowledge of the used framework or the programming language is not strictly necessary—just use the code around as an example. > b) Even if you can fix the code, you'll still have to build it. With > something size and complexity of firefox I bet it's not entirely > trivial even on freenix where you can fetch the "source package" and > all its pre-requisites. On systems without source package > management, with for-pay development tools, etc., it's basically not > worth the trouble. On Linux it may be considered not `entirely trivial' only the first time you do it, but for the second time you will know the appropriate mantra, such as configure & make or debian/rules build or rpmbuild. On Windows the build process is indeed not trivial, but the development tools are almost always free, for example, Firefox is built with Visual Studio 2010 Express. Fortunately, in many cases you do not need to do the compilation: once you find the place to fix, you may notice that the tweak you wanted to implement can be done without modification of the source code, for example, you will find that there is a preference that you can set from UI.
Dmitri Maziuk may not like or agree with earlier comments about Firefox, but the juvenile "Open Sores" name-calling really has no place in RISKS.
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