<story><title>Votebook – A proposal for a blockchain-based electronic voting system [pdf]</title><url>http://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/nyu.pdf</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>pedrocr</author><text>Paper elections are cheap, reliable and more importantly trustworthy even to people that have no idea what a symmetric key, hash or blockchain even is. But we had to go and screw up by creating extremely insecure voting machines and then come up with crazy schemes like this one to fix them. Do people really think all this complexity is a good thing? Paper elections are very well understood but you can easily come up with various exploits to at least disrupt an election under these systems. Once you give me all this shiny new attack surface I can:&lt;p&gt;- Hack the voting machines to just turn on the &amp;quot;duress&amp;quot; mode for everyone, or do it just in the precincts that tend to vote for my opponent&lt;p&gt;- Use my great new paper receipt to prove I have voted for candidate A and collect my bribe as if the paper receipt doesn&amp;#x27;t encode the candidate it&amp;#x27;s useless. I don&amp;#x27;t care to verify if my vote was counted if I can&amp;#x27;t verify that it was counted for my candidate&lt;p&gt;- Hack the voting machines to record candidates at random ignoring the key presses, turning the election into disarray&lt;p&gt;- Selectively deny network access at polling places to create longer queues at the sites where my opponent is stronger&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m sure you can cause a riot or two pretty easily. The fact that paper is dumb and paper elections use extremely simple technology, math and process is a feature not a bug.</text></comment>
<story><title>Votebook – A proposal for a blockchain-based electronic voting system [pdf]</title><url>http://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/nyu.pdf</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>badsock</author><text>Looking at the &amp;quot;Voting Machine Security Specifications&amp;quot;, it&amp;#x27;s a verified OS image connecting to a VPN over the internet on election day.&lt;p&gt;This means that you have to trust the:&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  * VPN
  * OS
  * Network stack
  * Display and input drivers (HW and SW)
  * SSD controller
  * CPU
  * CPU&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;Management Engine&amp;quot; or equivalent
  * Mainboard chipset
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
To all be free of exploits and backdoors.  You&amp;#x27;re trusting many, many thousands of people, from hundreds of different companies in several different nations, to not have put backdoors in, despite the fact that backdoors and exploits have been discovered after the fact in essentially all of the listed components.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t say this lightly: the authors are dangerous fools.  They&amp;#x27;re fools to think that this is secure enough for an election.  And they&amp;#x27;re dangerous because someone in power might believe them.</text></comment>