John Odum

DEF CON 33 - Voting Village - Is E2E Verifiability a Magic Bullet for Online Voting

End-to-End-Verifiability (E2E-V) is a cryptographic paradigm that, as applied to voting systems, allows voters to independently verify that their votes were cast as intended, guaranteeing that votes were recorded as cast, and tallied as recorded. As such, it is being promoted to public officers and elected officials at the county and state levels as the “magic bullet” allowing for secure voting over the internet. This talk will present, in a relatively low-tech way, that E2E-V is irrelevant to some attacks – both to servers outside the cryptographic “loop,” and particularly to client-side systems. E2E-V-equipped voting systems are primarily vulnerable to client-side malware, which would still be free to alter or sabotage voting applications and devices. The talk will present opinions from E2E-V. These perspectives are juxtaposed against opinions and rhetoric from the commercial promoters of internet voting systems, disputing the propositions of those promoters.