Not Quite a Blog

As I've detailed before, it's a bit of a pain in the butt to upgrade a jailbroken, unlocked iPhone (I have the 2G original iPhone). (Warning, I'd advise using these directions instead of those just linked to. I believe these to be superior.)

I hoped that AptBackup would help ease a bit of the pain... AptBackup saves a list of Cydia applications (applications that run on jailbroken iPhones) to a place that iTunes can back it up. The idea being that you restore from iTunes, restore from AptBackup and at least all your old programs are there. No dice. I don't think AptBackup works with iPhone OS 3.0. Anyway, it didn't seem to for me. (A friend pointed to this article which tells which files to copy via SSH from your iPhone once you've told AptBackup to "back up". This is handy if AptBackup barfs and you need to SSH in and copy these files back.)

Here's how I upgraded my 2G iPhone:

1. Had iTunes download, but not install, the iPhone OS 3.0 ipsw file.
2. I wrote down all the Cydia apps I had installed by starting Cydia and hitting the "manage" tab. As updating the FW removes any Cydia applications, you'll need to add these back one by one. (My list is below.)
3. Used PwnageTool 3.0 to create a customized version of the 3.0 ipsw file. Saved this file to someplace where I can find it.
4. Put the iPhone in DFU mode (or recovery mode?). I can never get this right. But I found a way to get it right every time: With your iPhone connected to your Mac, close iTunes and then open PwnageTool (you might have to close and re-open it). See that it has a tab labeled "DFU"? Click on that. This will walk you through how to put your iPhone in DFU mode. Close PwnageTool. (A friend told me that if your iphone is unlocked, you can use recovery mode instead... to get into that disconnect the iPhone, hold the home button while connecting it to USB.)
5. Open iTunes and it will notice the iPhone is in recovery mode. Option-click "Restore" and navigate to the ipsw file you created with PwnageTool. Let iTunes restore from the new firmware and re-sync. (takes a long time)
6. Re-install all the Cydia apps, one-by-one, from the list made above.
7. If you're on T-Mobile like me, in order to use the EDGE Data Network, you'll have to go to Settings -> General -> Network -> Cellular Data Network and put in epc.tmobile.com in for "APN" (or internet2.voicestream.com if you have T-Mobile's Total Internet package.).
8. If you've purchased Snapture (a campera app), you'll probably have to download SBSettings from the iPhone and reset the user directory permissions on your phone (more here). Later: Actually, I can't seem to get Snapture to work. Looks like Snapture Labs will have an updated binary "within hours". Even Later: If you're having a problem deleting old pics and taking new ones, use MobileTerminal or ssh into your phone and delete any directory like 100APPLE or 999APPLE from /private/var/mobile/Media/DCIM/. (see here)
9. Via Terminal, you should change the passwords on the root and mobile users from the default of alpine for both (in the last firmware, mobile's password was dottie, but not anymore.
10. If you've setup Cycorder to save videos to a directory in your Air Sharing directory tree (e.g., a la this post), you'll have to re-establish that symbolic link. (Tip: make sure the target directory exits and is chowned to mobile:mobile.)

There's been quite a bit of attention (EFF, NYT, BBC) paid to the letter to Google from 38 security experts requesting that they make HTTPS the default for their cloud computing services (GMail, Google Docs, Calendar, etc.).

The simple and somewhat neglected answer to this is a recent solution developed by the Stanford Web Security Group: ForceHTTPS. (The associated academic paper from Jackson and Barth is here.)

ForceHTTPS is a FireFox browser plugin that ensures that all connections to Google services use SSL and HTTPS. Additionally, it ensures that your Google cookie never gets sent when you perform a Google search, which is the only part of Google's services stack that does not support SSL. (It also forces HTTPS for PayPal, American Express, Bank of America, Chase, and Fidelity.)

So, take matters into your own hands and use it!

We've made available a pre-print version of our forthcoming EVT/WOTE 2009 paper. We'd appreciate any feedback, especially before next week, if at all possible.

You can grab the at either of these places:

http://arxiv.org/abs/0905.4691
http://ssrn.com/abstract=1411219

Implementing Risk-Limiting Audits in California

Joseph Lorenzo Hall, Luke W. Miratrix, Philip B. Stark, Melvin Briones, Elaine Ginnold, Freddie Oakley, Martin Peaden, Gail Pellerin, Tom Stanionis, Tricia Webber

Abstract: Risk-limiting post-election audits limit the chance of certifying an electoral outcome if the outcome is not what a full hand count would show. Building on previous work, we report on pilot risk-limiting audits in four elections during 2008 in three California counties: one during the February 2008 Primary Election in Marin County and three during the November 2008 General Elections in Marin, Santa Cruz and Yolo Counties. We explain what makes an audit risk-limiting and how existing and proposed laws fall short. We discuss the differences among our four pilot audits. We identify challenges to practical, efficient risk-limiting audits and conclude that current approaches are too complex to be used routinely on a large scale. One important logistical bottleneck is the difficulty of exporting data from commercial election management systems in a format amenable to audit calculations. Finally, we propose a bare-bones risk-limiting audit that is less efficient than these pilot audits, but avoids many practical problems.

(Because sometimes you need more than 140 characters...)

If you know me well, you know two things: 1) my favorite musical troupe of all time is Sonic Youth; and, 2) I played drums in a death metal band for a while in high school.

In fact, to this day, my most consistent listening habits are obscure hip-hop and very heavy artists. I just can't get enough.

I was intrigued to see an interview in Decibel with Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore about black metal. (If you don't know what black metal is, you won't find the rest of this post very interesting.)

In this interview, Thurston displays a very deep and broad knowledge of black metal, linking it to the avant-garde stuff he's found so inspiring for so long. He talks about how it's so raw and how it's so much not about being music but being art. It's such a great display of his devotion to all things sonic, and it's a fun read. Not to mention that there are bands in there that only the encyclopedic have ever heard of.

However, he also says the following about death metal:

Were you ever into death metal?
I really drew the line between black metal and death metal. Death metal was obviously more of a technically proficient kind of playing, which I had no interest in. I wanted to hear music by people who had no desire to impress with any kind of traditional, skilled playing. I do appreciate hearing riff masters, but they’re a dime a dozen.

This, as someone who respects Thurston probably way way more than I should, kind of caught me off-guard. I assumed that any musicians that were putting forth concerted effort to express themselves wouldn't be met by a godfather with such disinterest.

When I was playing this stuff in Albuquerque in '93-'95, we frankly had no idea that black metal existed (if it was even called that, which seems doubtful). We knew about american music mostly and the occasional European act like Bolthrower (U.K.). We certainly weren't jet-setting around the world playing shows and having any sort of insight into how metal varied around the world.

Maybe I'm reading too much into a few sentences in an interview. I can't help but be a bit disappointed. I'd like to think we can find something of value in most types of artistic expression. And to write off a whole genre of music that I hold close to my heart... well, it's just too bad.

(BTW, Sonic Youth has a new record out tomorrow: http://70.32.78.35/sonicnews/?p=13.)

If you have trouble posting comments, send them to me via email and I'll post them like I did with Ross' below.

(I'm traveling this week in California for meetings and the Privacy Law Scholar's Conference, so Mike and Eric beat me to this announcement...)

I'm delighted to announce that the Program for the Electronic Voting Technology Workshop/Workshop on Trustworthy Elections 2009 (EVT/WOTE '09) is now available:

http://www.usenix.org/event/evtwote09/tech/tech.html

The workshop will be in Montreal, Canada from 10-11 August co-located with USENIX Security. As one of three co-chairs---David Jefferson of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Tal Moran of Harvard being the other two---I am very excited about this year's line-up.

Our keynote address will be delivered by the Brennan Center's Larry Norden. Papers include submissions on usability, forensics, security, cryptography, end-to-end systems and auditing. We will also have a "rump" session (more from Eric) for informal presentations (works in progress, humor, etc.) and a demo session where developers and vendors can bounce their systems off of a technical crowd.

(Note for those unfamiliar: All major publishing in computer science and related fields is done at conferences... that is, if you want to get tenure or a promotion as an academic in these fields, you'd better be publishing in these venues, journals be damned. :) USENIX Security is one of three of the most prestigious venues for computer security. We've "co-located" EVT with USENIX Security for the past four years... which makes it a bit difficult to attract people from other disciplines that don't value this particular venue. Anyway, we've worked hard to make EVT and now EVT/WOTE (we combined with another workshop) a multidisciplinary venue that is rigorously peer-reviewed.)

Here are the paper titles, for your browsing:

• Now Do Voters Notice Review Screen Anomalies? A Look at Voting System Usability
• Style guide for voting system documentation: Why user-centered documentation matters to voting security
• E-Voting and Forensics: Complement or Contradiction?
• Detecting Voter Fraud in an Electronic Voting Context: An Analysis of the Unlimited Reelection Vote in Venezuela
• The New Jersey Voting-machine Lawsuit and the AVC Advantage DRE Voting
• Can DREs Provide Everlasting Security? The Case of Return-Oriented Programming and the AVC Advantage
• Understanding the Security Properties of Ballot-Based Verification Techniques
• VoteBox Nano: A Smaller, Stronger FPGA-based Voting Machine
• Some Consequences of Paper Fingerprinting for Elections
• Electing a University President using Open-Audit Voting: Analysis of real-world use of Helios
• Efficient Receipt-Free Ballot Casting Resistant to Covert Channels
• On Subliminal Channels in Encrypt-on-Cast Voting Systems
• Permutations in Pret a Voter with Paillier Encryption
• Weight, Weight, Don't Tell Me: Using Scales to Select Ballots for Auditing
• Automating Voting Terminal Event Log Analysis
• On the Security of Election Audits with Low Entropy Randomness
• Interstate Voter Registration Database Matching: The Oregon-Washington 2008 Pilot Project
• Software Support for Software-Independent Auditing
• Implementing Risk-Limiting Audits in California

I, along with a number of others, seemed to have forgotten that my school has a pre-print repository through the California Digital Library.

The UC Berkeley School of Information eScholarship Repository contains publications, preprints, papers, and reports about work conducted under the auspices of the I School. Watch that space.

I have a feeling as many of us have conveniently remembered it exists, that you'll start to see a slew of interesting papers pop up there.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License and contains pieces directly copied from Brian Carver.

I voted today in the Jersey City Municipal Election.

I decided, as you can see, to wear my EKR-designed California Top-To-Bottom Review T-shirt. That may not have been the wisest decision; it made me a bit nervous. One pollworker remarked, "Love the shirt!", although I was pretty sure she meant the lolspeak and not the specific application thereof. When she said that to me, I thought, "Damn. The jig is up." and decided to vote as quickly as possible (so that they couldn't say I was messing with the machine). I was in and out of the voting booth in about 5 seconds (srsly).

In my haste, I forgot to vote for one of the at-large councilperson seats; I voted for 2 candidates instead of the allowed 3. Sigh. I didn't realize this until I was halfway home. So, Lori Serrano, you missed my vote today due to this mistake; I'm sorry.

Undervote notification -- where a voting system lets you know if you're ballot isn't complete -- is a good thing! (The Sequoia AVC Advantages that are used in Jersey City don't do this... or at least were not configured to do so.)

(Cross-posted at Freedom to Tinker.)

Short version: we now have gobs of voting system ITA reports, publicly available and hosted by the NSF ACCURATE e-voting center.

Long version: Before the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) took over the testing and certification of voting systems under the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), this critical function was performed by volunteers. The National Association of State Election Directors (NASED) recognized a need for voting system testing and partnered with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) to establish a qualification program that would test systems as having met or exceeded the requirements of the 1990 and 2002 Voting System Standards.^*

However, as I've lamented many, many times over the years, the input, output and intermediate work product of the NASED testing regime were completely secret, due to proprietary concerns on behalf of the manufacturers. Once a system completed testing, members of the public could see that an entry was made in a publicly-available spreadsheet listing the tested components and a NASED qualification number for the system. But the public was permitted no other insight into the NASED qualification regime.

Researchers were convinced from what evidence was available that the quality of the testing was highly inadequate and that the expertise didn't exist within either the testing laboratories to perform adequate testing or the NASED technical committee to competently review the ultimate test reports submitted by the laboratories (called Independent Testing Authorities (ITA)). Naturally, when reports of problems started to crop-up, like the various Hursti vulnerabilities with Diebold memory cards, the NASED system scrambled to figure out what went wrong.

I know have more moderate views with respect to the NASED regime: sure, it was pretty bad and a lot of serious vulnerabilities slipped through the cracks, but I'm not yet convinced that just having the right people or a different process in place would have resulted in fewer problems in the field. To have fixed the NASED system would have required improvements on all fronts: the technology, the testing paradigms, the people involved and the testing and certification process.

The EAC has since taken over testing and certification. Their process is notable in its much higher level of openness and accountability; the test plans are published (previously claimed as proprietary by the testing labs), the test reports are published (previously claimed as proprietary by the vendors) and the process is specified in detail with a program manual, a laboratory manual, notices of clarification, etc.

This is all great and it helps to increase the transparency of the EAC certification program. But, what about the past? What about the testing that NASED did? Well, we don't know much about it for a number of reasons, chief among them that we never saw any of the materials mentioned above that are now available in the new EAC system.

Through a fortunate FOIA request made of the EAC on behalf of election sleuth Susan Greenhalgh, we now have available a slew of ITA reports from one of the ITAs, Ciber.

The reports are available at the following location (hosted by our NSF ACCURATE e-voting center):

http://accurate-voting.org/docs/ita-reports/

These reports cover the Software ITA testing performed by the ITA Ciber for the following voting systems:

• Automark AIMS 1.0.9
• Diebold GEMS 1.18.19
• Diebold GEMS 1.18.22
• Diebold GEMS 1.18.24
• Diebold AccuVote-TSx Model D
• Diebold AccuVote-TSx Model D w/ AccuView Printer
• Diebold Assure 1.0
• Diebold Assure 1.1
• Diebold Election Media Processor 4.6.2
• Diebold Optical Scan Accumulator Adapter
• Hart System 4.0
• Hart System 4.1
• Hart System 6.0
• Hart System 6.2
• Hart System 6.2.1

I'll be looking at these in my leisure over coming weeks and pointing out interesting features of these reports and the associated correspondence included in the FOIA production.

^*The distinction between certification and qualification, although vague, appears to be that under the NASED system, states did the ultimate certification of a voting system for fitness in future elections.

Co-founder of VotersUnite! and good friend, John Gideon, died last night in Seattle after suddenly coming down with (what appears to have been) bacterial meningitis.

I haven't seen an obituary yet, but when one is written, it will show that he spent his life in service to this country, with the last few years as a central pivot point in the election integrity movement.

(BradBlog has a moving post about John up now; however, as John knew, I don't endorse, link to or otherwise traffic in Brad Friedman. So, you'll have to go find it yourself.)

Frankly, I am having a hard time getting much done today, as my thoughts constantly return to John, and the uncertain future of all things election-related. It's so true that "we don't know what we had until it's gone", but I'd like to think I appreciated John and his work quite a bit when he was still with us. However, to fill his shoes is going to be a big task; one that will take many of us to pitch in where we can.

I'd like to point something out and make a proposal. John was underappreciated, in my opinion. People who knew him probably knew him best through either his 7-days-a-week Daily Voting News which aggregated all news stories about voting technology for over five years. He also tirelessly worked to keep all of us honest; through intellectual inquiry for people like me, through watchdog-like activity and public records requests for election officials and by not pulling punches when it came to getting to the bottom of advocate positions and perspectives.

So, now the proposal: I think the best way to honor John Gideon would be to set up an award, scholarship or fellowship for under-appreciated election integrity work. There are too damn many ways for people who are at the forefront of their work to be recognized: MacArthur awards, Nobels, Fields, Turings, etc. What we need more of are honors for people that are just doing their goddamn jobs, doing them well, consistently and happy to continue to do so. That was John.