Bagong Botante: Automated 2010 Elections are Safe!
By Rico, 7:07 am Mon Nov 16 2009 - Sites - 2 Opinions
So the people behind the machines to be used in the 2010 elections have developed Bagong Botante, a “social network site” to explain the automated election process, an attempt to convince more people that the upcoming 2010 elections are safeguarded against irregularities.
Aside from a FAQ summarizing the various steps used to protect the votes as they’re transmitted from precinct to server, the site also features photos, videos, and blogs. Not to mention a forum, where a super-technical post explains why it’s practically impossible to intercept, decrypt, and modify election returns as they’re transmitted for final processing. Here’s a particularly head-scratching snippet:
“We presented related-key boomerang attacks on the full AES-192 and the full AES-256. The differential trails for the attacks are based on the idea of finding local collisions in the block cipher. We showed that optimal key-schedule trails should be based on low-weight codewords in the key schedule. We also exploit various boomerang-switching techniques, which help us to gain free rounds in the middle of the cipher. However, both our attacks are still mainly of theoretical interest and do not present a threat to practical applications using AES.”
Ano daw? In any case, Bagong Botante is part of a campaign to convince the electorate that of the upcoming automated elections’ integrity, which has included media events to highlight the security of the system.
Personally, now that such a campaign is in full swing, I’m more convinced that the Philippines can successfully pull this off come 2010. What about you? I just wish proponents of election automation started such a campaign sooner.
melvin
4:04 pm Mon Nov 16 2009
I hope we can automate the elections. But no matter what Comelec does, we cannot have 100% automated elections. Why? Because the telcos only cover about 70% of the archipelago.
I’m also sure that the transmission of the vote data will be impossible to intercept and decrypt. But that’s not the problem. The firmware for the machine is loaded via usb and is not hard-wired for absolute security. The enterprising politician then will just need to hire a tech who can write code that will automatically change the vote data in favor of the politician.
Rico
9:09 am Tue Nov 17 2009
Well there’s always the human factor… and yeah, no matter how secure the encryption (AES encryption is secure enough for use in banks), if anyone gets a guy on the inside, it’s game over… hopefully there are also security precautions for human factors.