Security News > 2020 > February > Hackers Can Seize Control of Ballots Cast Using the Voatz Voting App, Researchers Say
Security researchers have found key flaws in a mobile voting app that some states plan to use in the 2020 election that can allow hackers to launch both client- and server-side attacks that can easily manipulate or even delete someone's vote, as well as prevent a reliable audit from taking place after the fact, they said.
A team of researchers at MIT released a security audit of Voatz-a blockchain app that already was used in a limited way for absentee-ballot voting in the 2018 mid-term elections-that they said bolsters the case for why internet voting is a bad idea and voting transparency is the only way to ensure legitimacy.
Despite the company's claim that the app has a number of security features that make it safe for such an auspicious use-including immutability via its use of a permissioned blockchain, end-to-end voting encryption, voter anonymity, device compromise detection, and a voter-verified audit trail-the MIT team found that any attacker that controls the user's device through some very rudimentary flaws can brush aside these protections.
"We find that an attacker with root privileges on the device can disable all of Voatz's host-based protections, and therefore stealthily control the user's vote, expose her private ballot, and exfiltrate the user's PIN and other data used to authenticate the server," MIT researchers Michael A. Specter, James Koppe and Daniel Weitzner wrote in their paper, "The Ballot is Busted Before the Blockchain: A Security Analysis of Voatz, the First Internet Voting Application Used in U.S.Federal Elections."
One voting district in Washington state-Mason County-already has pulled its plans to use Voatz in November, according to the New York Times, while West Virginia is moving ahead with its plans to expand Voatz used to disabled voters, the paper reported.