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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   34913 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 28, 2024

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Colorado Department of State has put out a press-release on a whoopsie:

The Colorado Department of State is aware that a spreadsheet located on the Department’s website improperly included a hidden tab including partial passwords to certain components of Colorado voting systems.

The Colorado Public Radio elaborates on what kind of passwords these were, and to which machines:

The Colorado Secretary of State’s office says a spreadsheet on the department’s website improperly included a tab with partial passwords to certain components of Colorado voting systems, known as BIOS passwords.

The Colorado Department of State calls these "partial" passwords and says no worries re election integrity:

“This does not pose an immediate security threat to Colorado’s elections, nor will it impact how ballots are counted,” wrote a spokesman for the office, Jack Todd, in a statement Tuesday. ... “There are two unique passwords for every election equipment component, which are kept in separate places and held by different parties. Passwords can only be used with physical in-person access to a voting system,” he wrote.

The BIOS passwords, that were stored unencrypted on an Excel spreadsheet that was up on the department's website (but in a hidden tap!), are "partial" in a sense that one needs another password to access "every election component".

I am not a certified IT geek, so I asked Claude for top three security concerns if a hacker got my computer's BIOS password:

Evil Maid Attack: They could modify boot settings to load malicious software before your operating system starts, potentially bypassing your OS security measures. This could allow them to install rootkits or keyloggers that are very difficult to detect.

Hardware Security Bypass: They could disable security features like Secure Boot or TPM (Trusted Platform Module), making your system more vulnerable to other attacks and potentially compromising disk encryption.

Data Theft: By changing boot order to external devices, they could boot into a different operating system to potentially access your hard drive data, even bypassing some OS-level password protections.

Those sound serious. That's OK, though, because I need my usual password to get into my account, so the BIOS password for my computer is just "partial", right? Claude patiently replies "Nope":

With BIOS access, an attacker can bypass your Windows password in several ways... [gives several examples of what one can do when booting from an external drive]. Think of it this way: Your Windows password is like a lock on your house's front door, but BIOS access is like having keys to all the windows and back doors. No matter how strong your front door lock is, if someone can get in another way, it won't help.

The Colorado Department of State, in their press release, give a paragraph describing why one shouldn't worry that this may compromise the voting equipment:

Colorado elections include many layers of security. There are two unique passwords for every election equipment component, which are kept in separate places and held by different parties. Passwords can only be used with physical in-person access to a voting system. Under Colorado law, voting equipment must be stored in secure rooms that require a secure ID badge to access. That ID badge creates an access log that tracks who enters a secure area and when. There is 24/7 video camera recording on all election equipment. Clerks are required to maintain restricted access to secure ballot areas, and may only share access information with background-checked individuals. No person may be present in a secure area unless they are authorized to do so or are supervised by an authorized and background-checked employee. There are also strict chain of custody requirements that track when a voting systems component has been accessed and by whom. It is a felony to access voting equipment without authorization.

I have highlighted all that impressive-sounding security: secure rooms, secure ID badge, secure area... So with all that carefully thought-out security protocol, how the F*@& did the BIOS passwords got stored unencrypted on a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet in the first place? Let alone how that Excel file got onto the Department of state website? According to the Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold:

Griswold said the mistake was made by a “civil servant” in the Secretary of State’s Office, who no longer works there. “Ultimately, a civil servant made a serious mistake and we're actively working to address it,” Griswold said. “Humans make mistakes.”

Which mistake, Secretary Griswold? The act of compiling of the unencrypted BIOS passwords onto a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet? The act of hiding that tab and leaving it on a Microsoft Excel document meant for sharing with broader audience? The act of uploading that document to the Department's website, free to download to anyone on the web? I am far more interested in answers to that first question, because it says quite a lot about the level of professionalism that underlies the security system of Colorado voting equipment.

What is the job of the Colorado Secretary of State?

The basic mission of the Department of State is to collect, secure, and make accessible a wide variety of public records, ensure the integrity of elections, and enhance commerce.

The Colorado GOP, therefore, wants to know if Secretary Griswold will resign. Her response:

[Republicans in the state House] are the same folks who have spread conspiracies and lies about our election systems over and over and over again," Griswold told Colorado Public Radio. "Ultimately, a civil servant made a serious mistake and we're actively working to address it," Griswold said, adding, "I have faced conspiracy theories from elected Republicans in this state, and I have not been stopped by any of their efforts and I'm going to keep on doing my job."

So that's a no, then. Plus, a nice implication that this whoopsie is also part and parcel of the "conspiracies and lies about our election system".

Is it too late to switch to that system we had the Iraqis use, with the ink-on-the-finger that stains the skin for the following week?

This could be less serious than it seems. If the voting system is designed right, a BIOS password would be insufficient to cast a fraudulent vote - one possible example is in the vein of Windows' Bitlocker. A modified BIOS would cause the OS to reject the boot attempt, so you'd fail to get anywhere. If you booted something else, like a facsimile of the actual voting system but that swaps 25% of the votes for Trump to Harris or something, then you wouldn't have the credentials to submit the votes gathered and your pack of votes would be tossed.

But you could also use that as the attack, if you deploy machines that look like they're doing the right thing but then have bad/missing credentials and their votes are not counted, you could poke holes in areas that lean heavily Trump. This would be detectable after the fact - there'd be machines that mysteriously "glitched out" but you can't trust the machine so those votes can't come back in.

Either way, that's assuming there's decent security design in place. And of course, if they are right that you need access to the machine to put in the password and there's no remote management gunk somebody forgot to disable and they're under 24-7 guard, then the leak isn't actionable in the first place.

So overall effect - if you trust them to be mostly competent, things are in fact fine (unless/until a bunch of machines' worth of votes are tossed).

A modified BIOS would cause the OS to reject the boot attempt

I don't know how the security architecture works in detail, but that really seems like the sort of thing a modified BIOS could work around with a strategic byte write to a known memory address. It's ~impossible to defend yourself against an attacker running on a higher ring than you.

You are, in principle, correct but that's exactly what dedicated cryptography hardware like a TPM is there to resolve. The BIOS stuffs some values not known ahead of time but measured/detected during the boot process (like a hash of the values in a bunch of different registers at point D during an ABCDEFG register sequence) into the hardware gizmo. Then the OS polls the gizmo for its current value and tries to decrypt its main boot volume using that as the key - wrong value, fail to boot. A compromised BIOS will now get different results from the measurements/hashses and can't reproduce that same state. If it had full control over the TPM, it could, but it doesn't - it does not respect ring 0. To be clear, there is still a way to beat this - you just have to monitor the values sent to the gizmo and then replay them in order, rather than trying to do the measurements yourself, but you can't accomplish that without physical access to the internals of the machine and some kind of sensor/probe to watch whichever bus the traffic goes over. You can also try to crack open the gizmo and read back its state, but that's also access-to-internals level.

Ah, that's fair. So for instance the TPM could detect a patched bios by polling the actual eeprom for a checksum? Or just signature check the whole thing. It wouldn't even have to use the BIOS to talk to the hardware in the first place. The BIOS just has to go "okay, you have the hardware, I won't touch the bus for the next x ms."

I guess that's pretty convincing in theory. (Do I trust that it's actually working like that? Is it even on?)

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