Open and Secret?

Scanning the news last week, I found rumors of Premier Systems (the voting system vendor formerly known ad Diebold) going open-source, and of the Federal government pondering cases where voting system test results should be confidential. An interesting juxtaposition!

The first item I call a rumor not because I disbelieve the blogger in question, but because Premier hasn’t announced anything. But the blog article does contain some interesting stuff, including a paraphrase of Premier’s CEO opining that releasing source code to the public would be an approach that results in several beneficial outcomes.

At the other end of the spectrum we have some news from a recent meeting of the EAC’s standards committee, including discussion of the new Voluntary Voting Systems Guidelines draft, intended for use in Federal certification testing of products like those from Premier. The draft would require that the result of the testing process should include documentation of all attacks the system is designed to resist or detect, as well as any vulnerabilities known to the manufacturer. Some committee members pondered whether the vendors should mark this information as confidential.

Some observers have questioned whether it would be appropriate to certify a system that has known security vulnerabilities. Others have pointed out that every system has vulnerabilities, and that the important issue is to be clear about the definition and boundaries of security, sometimes called a “threat model.” Within those defined limits, customers should be very clear about what deployment and operational procedures that they need to adhere to, in order to maintain the integrity of system as defined by the vendor; beyond those limits, caveat emptor.

We might take up that debate another day. But for now, the obvious old adage applies: you can’t have it both ways. If a system is truly open, then there are no secrets — though you can try hushing up issues that can be readily discovered by directly inspecting the open system. However, I think that there is a case to be made that there really are no secrets, especially for systems that are important enough that people really do want to know “whether it really works.” Next time, a couple specific examples from recently published voting machine security studies, that have put me in mind of another saying: “Open, Sesame!”

— EJS