David Dill and Avi Rubin on Open Source

NewsForge
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Title E-voting: paper trail versus transparency
Date 2005.07.13 11:00
Author Jay Lyman
Topic
http://software.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=05/07/06/182210

In the heat of major political campaigns and elections, we hear a lot about electronic voting and the fight over their accuracy and trustworthiness. However, it is now -- between elections -- that the real work gets done. While experts have placed transparency through open source systems and software high on the list of requirements for trustworthy elections, the debate over a verifiable voter paper receipt has recently overshadowed all other issues. Experts indicated while both printed paper backups and open code are key components to reliable and trustworthy electronic voting, openness may be suffering from lack of attention and support.

When asked about the state of e-voting and significance of openness, two leading experts -- VerifiedVoting's David Dill, who testified last month before the U.S. Senate Rules Committee, and Avi Rubin, Johns Hopkins University computer science professor and critic of current e-voting solutions -- offered their thoughts via e-mail.

NF: What's the status of the idea of making e-voting technologies transparent, meaning open source software and systems?

David Dill: Open source means different things to different people. I favor full public disclose of voting machine software (and the rest of the designs, including the hardware). It might be appropriate to let companies clean up their programs before releasing them, to avoid exposing security holes, though. "Disclosed source" is not the same as an "open source development model" such as that used in Linux. Open source development might be a good thing for voting machines, too, but I'll wait and see whether someone can do it successfully. No one has yet required that voting machine designs be publicly disclosed. The Holt bill in the U.S. House would require it if it were to pass in its current form.

Avi Rubin: Morbid. I don't see anybody making an effort to do that. In general, vendors prefer to hide behind a "proprietary" argument, and I don't see legislators forcing them to release the source code. By the way, that could be a disaster. Software that is written under the assumption of secrecy (regardless of how ludicrous that assumption is) and is then disclosed could introduce problems. Software should be designed to be publicly available from the start of a project.

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