Computer science

Security breach
Computer science’s Wallach teaches computer security through unsecure voting machines

BY PATRICK KURP
Special to the Rice News

Dan Wallach is that rare professor who encourages his students to “be evil.”

The associate professor of computer science and in electrical and computer engineering instructs them to pretend they are employees of a company manufacturing electronic voting machines.

JEFF FITLOW

Dan Wallach, associate professor of computer science and in electrical and computer engineering, has concerns about paperless electronic voting systems — concerns students often prove valid in his popular “Hack-a-Vote” course.

“Your assignment as an employee of the Hack-a-Vote Corp. is to make minimal changes to the voting machine that will enable you to compromise the election,” he instructed. “But there’s a caveat: You know somebody will be reading over your changes and trying to figure them out.”

The idea is for students to break election laws and influence outcomes not the old-fashioned way — through bribery, ballot-stuffing or threats — but through technological subtlety.

“You want somebody auditing the source code to miss the changes you’ve made,” Wallach said. Students write their code and then swap the assignments with other students whose job it is to figure out what they have done to subvert the process.

Since 2001, Wallach has devoted at least a portion of his teaching and research to voting security, initially in the context of general computer security. With the midterm general election coming up Nov. 7, Wallach said, “These issues aren’t going away.”

Wallach has testified as an expert witness in six voting cases in three states, most recently in Colorado and Webb County, Texas.

“I first considered electronic-voting security issues after Harris County adopted Hart InterCivic’s paperless eSlate system in 2001,” he said. “I live in Harris County, and because I was known locally for my work in computer security, I testified before the Houston City Council about whether this was a good idea. My opinion then, as now, is that paperless electronic voting systems introduce a wide variety of security issues that appear to not have been given serious consideration by the vendors or state and federal certification standards.”

Wallach has since become the associate director of the National Science Foundation-sponsored ACCURATE (A Center for Correct, Usable, Reliable, Auditable and Transparent Elections), a collaborative project involving six institutions. It investigates software architectures, tamper-resistant hardware, cryptographic protocols and verification systems as applied to electronic voting systems.

This fall, Wallach is teaching “Election Systems, Technologies and Administration” (COMP 435) with Robert Stein, the Lena Gohlman Fox Professor of Political Science, and Mike Byrne, associate professor of psychology. The course description explains their objectives:

“We will consider three questions: How do individual voters interact with the voting technology? How are voting technologies engineered to be accurate and secure? How do the social aspects of voting fulfill democratic goals for elections? A central requirement for this course will be group research projects, many operating in our community, built around the November 2006 election.”

By himself, Wallach teaches “Computer Systems Security” (COMP 527), which incorporates a unit known familiarly as “Hack-a-Vote.”

About the popularity of Hack-a-Vote with students, Wallach said, “Most students will find most problems, but some things slip through. There have even been cases where students found a problem in the original voting machine as we gave it to them, so for phase one of the course they did nothing. They submitted the voting machine as is.”

Among Wallach’s former students is David Price ’03, who took two classes with Wallach and worked for him one summer, writing the initial version of Hack-a-Vote. Price has since graduated from Stanford Law School and now works as a law clerk for a federal judge in Washington.
Price said of Wallach, “In a classroom, he’s outstanding. He has a manner that’s at the same time unassuming and very, very focused. He seems to be perpetually amused by the subject matter, and he keeps students engaged and thinking about the issues. It doesn’t hurt that he teaches what, in my opinion, is the coolest class offered at Rice.”

Wallach stresses that he is not concerned solely with voter fraud: “There’s lots of evidence of simple human incompetence. Most voting officials try real hard, but problems happen.”

—Patrick Kurp is a science writer in the George R. Brown School of Engineering.