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Seal security
January 23, 2011
Andrew Appel has a nice post on Freedom to Tinker on the mystique of the tamper-indicating seals often used in electronic voting systems. His conclusion: as with all security mechanisms, one should verify how well they work.
Tamper-indicating seals do not work too well, according to Roger Johnston, who with his group at Livermore and Argonne national laboratories, has assessed a variety of seals used in programs of waste management and nuclear disarmament. Their reports are scary and fascinating to read at the same time.
We did our share of testing security seals when we were investigating the security of the electronic voting systems used in California, as part of the Top-To-Bottom Review. Unsurprisingly (that is, after reading Johnston's reports), we were able to defeat the seals in use at that time and gain access to the internals of the machines they were supposed to protect. For example, we could extract and replace memory cards, power on and off a machine, and access its mother board without breaking or altering any of the protective seals that should have revealed these operations.
The following video shows an example of the simple attacks that were possible:
The real question then is: what do you when you find that tamper-indicating seals do not work?
