] In the aftermath of the Florida election debacle, the IEEE
] took up the question of standards for voting equipment.
] It created a working group, called Project P1583,
] overseen by a Standards Coordinating Committee known as
] SCC 38. After passage by IEEE, this standard will go to
] ANSI for final validation. The substantive work is in
] its final stages, and the draft standard is currently out
] to ballot.

The EFF put this alert out about the IEEE Voting Systems Standard group. I asked them for more information. They provided this link to the standards committee, which they say they will put on their site:

http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/scc38/index.htm
http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/scc38/1583/

While the draft standard is only available if you spend $100 on it, there are parts of the standard on this site if you do some digging. In particular, the security standards are available.

I think there are some serious questions that might be raised about these security standards. This is what I told the EFF:

"I haven't read this document in extreme detail, but it does appear at first glance to be weak. A glaring example is this text: "Voting systems that use electromagnetic (wireline or wireless) or optical (open air or fibre optic) transmission of data shall ensure the integrity of all transmitted data. This shall include standard transmission error detection and correction methods such as checksums or message digest hashes."

Checksums are not a reliable data integrity technique when one is concerned about malicious manipulation of data. This misuse of checksums in electronic voting equipment was discussed in Avi Rubin's paper on the leaked Diebold code.

This is just one example. There are all kinds of questions the might be raised about this document. Why allow voting systems to operate in an environment shared by other data processing applications? Are the restrictions on network connections complete enough? Why is there no discussion of programming techniques used to prevent memory management ("buffer overflow") vulnerabilities. Why not have more specific requirements for authentication of voting system administrators? Why is there no discussion of the security of features which maintain the anonymity of voters?

In sum, they ought to solicit audits of their security standards from well respected security professionals."

EFF: Make Your Voice Heard on E-Voting Machines