As a major technology provider, Microsoft takes its responsibility in securing political elections very seriously. It announces an SDK to protect electronic voting machines during elections and an anti-phishing system for election campaigns.
The 2016 U.S. presidential election made the world aware of a new threat to cybersecurity: interference with a country’s democratic institutions. This includes several factors: campaigns to influence voters (especially on social networks), but also a theft of data from campaigns or political parties, and even a hypothetical manipulation of the results by hacking the voting machines.
Tracking of voting machines
On May 6, at its Build 2019 conference, Microsoft announced two measures to fight against these risks. The first is ElectionGuard, an open-source software development kit designed in partnership with Galois. It can be integrated into voting machines to ensure both their security against intrusions, but also provide end-to-end traceability that allows the public to verify the integrity of votes.
Each voter obtains a unique code that allows him to follow an encrypted version of his vote through a web portal set up by the agency in charge of the election. An optional step during the vote allows him to check that his vote matches to his choice and that it has been counted. But once the vote is final, it is no longer possible to reveal its contents. However, the code is used to verify that the vote is still valid and has not been altered.
Homomorphic encryption
An open specification also allows anyone to write a program to verify that all votes have been correctly matched (without obviously revealing the voting choices). System security is ensured by homomorphic encryption developed by Microsoft Research under the tutelage of Josh Benaloh. In addition to all this, the system facilitates the audit of the results by verification bodies through a statistical analysis process.
Microsoft is already working with voting machine manufacturers to integrate ElectionGuard into their systems. The SDK will be released on GitHub in June 2019. The company is also developing a baseline voting system that will be made public by the end of 2019. It should be noted that ElectionGuard is a tool designed to complement paper ballots and is not designed to allow Internet voting.
“We believe technology companies have a responsibility to help protect our democratic processes and institutions. Modern technology can be used to ensure the voting process is resilient,” wrote Tom Burt, Corporate Vice President, Customer Security & Trust at Microsoft, in a blogpost. “At the same time, ElectionGuard is not intended to replace paper ballots but rather to supplement and improve systems that rely on them, and it is not designed to support internet voting. In short, ElectionGuard is a new tool for use by the existing election community and government entities that run elections.”
An anti-phishing system for election campaigns
The second announcement concerns the securing of election campaigns and is called Microsoft 365 CampaignGuard. These are in fact the same high-level protection features that Microsoft offers to large companies (such as AccountGuard), but simplified, preconfigured, optimized for campaigns, and especially with a preferential price. It is primarily a question of thwarting phishing attacks, which represents 90% of the entry point of criminals into campaigns according to Microsoft. The offer will also be launched in June, but will be initially reserved for the US federal authorities.
Sources : Microsoft and WRAL Tech Wire
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