Secure Systems Engineering, Fall 2024

Root the (Ballot) Box

Please read this description in its entirety before starting the project!

The goal will be to utilize your knowledge from the course to write a voting machine in Rust and embed backdoors inside of it that would allow a knowledgeable attacker to cheat in the election. Then, you will be given another team’s voting machine to attack, attempting to find all of the vulnerabilities (intentional or not) in their system. Finally, your group will present on both your own machine and your experience attacking the other group’s machine.

Part 1: The voting machine

You will start by writing code for a voting machine. The voting system must have the following features:

The “machine” is not a physical device; we expect your group to create a Rust software package that provides the above functionality at minimum. We suggest that the “machine” be a command-line application, but you may also write a web front-end. Cite any sources you used if you find code elsewhere to include in your machine.

Note that we require the machine to be written mostly in Rust. You may, however, include other programming languages (e.g., C) as sub-components. Also, you can use whatever Rust libraries you would like to aid your implementation.

We encourage you to be creative, and add additional features!

Building in vulnerabilities

After your group finalizes the voting machine code, the second phase will be to (covertly) add in vulnerabilities as backdoors to the code. These backdoors should clearly compromise the integrity of the voting machine. Remember that the goal of this project is to change the outcome of the election, not just “break” the application. This does not just mean changing vote totals – there are many ways to compromise an election, so be creative!

We expect at least two backdoors explicitly coded into the voting machine. We encourage you to be creative in this as well. These should be surreptitious – a regular user should not be able to accidentally find them! Also note that someone analyzing the source code should not be able to easily find them either.

What to turn in

Building the voting machines is half of the project. Submit the following the Blackboard before the code submission due date:

Part 2: The red team

For this part of the project, you will be given one gzipped distribution of source code and a user manual for another group’s voting machine. Your team’s goal is to perform a security analysis of the voting machine. You will try to find all of the vulnerabilities that the other team put into their bad voting machine, plus any other unintentional vulnerabilities. This part is open ended – be creative in your analyses, and try to find different ways of dissecting the codebase to find vulnerabilities and backdoors.

The project will culminate in a group presentation in front of the rest of the class. First, you will describe your voting machines and the backdoors and vulnerabilities that you inserted. Focus more on the interesting aspects of your machine: any additional features you added to the machine over the above requirements, as well as the location and purpose of your backdoors. Then, you will describe the voting machines you were assigned to analyze and you will explain what your red team analysis uncovered. The presentation should cover all of the analyses you did, even those that did not detect any vulnerabilities or backdoors. Demos of both systems would be useful, but keep an eye on your time.

In your presentation, provide a more in-depth exploration of the backdoors you found. For a found vulnerability to be a backdoor, you must prove that it will lead to a change in the outcome of the election. You may discuss any vulnerabilities that are not true backdoors, but be clear about their impact to the voting machine.

The presentation should be 12 minutes long. If you do not have enough to talk about for 12 minutes, then you need to do more analysis! Each group member should speak for an equal amount of time (approximately). There may be questions from the audience afterwards, so be prepared!

What to turn in

Submit the following to Blackboard before the slides submission date:

Grading

The project will be graded according to the following rubrics. Please reach out to the instructor if you require any clarifications on the above requirements or below rubrics.

Code & demo

On the demo day, your group will meet with the instructor to discuss and demonstrate your (backdoored) voting machine. The demo will be structured around the following criteria:

  1. Voting machine completeness (30 points). The instructor will guide your group through a series of tests designed to check if your code has the required minimum voting machine functionality described above. The instructor will also ensure that your code is mostly written in Rust.
  2. Voting machine correctness (15 points). The instructor will stress-test your implementation to see if it performs incorrect behavior accidentally (e.g., allowing an unregistered voter to cast a ballot, crashing on unexpected input). You will not be penalized for your intentional backdoors, of course.
  3. Voting machine design (5 points). While this is not a programming course, the instructor will look through the voting machine code to ensure that it is organized reasonably well. You may be required to defend your design decisions.
  4. Backdoor correctness (20 points). The instructor will ask to see the backdoors in action. Your group must clearly show – explaining each step – how a user with access to the voting machine application can subvert the election using each of your backdoors.
  5. Backdoor design (20 points). The instructor will ask your group questions to assess the quality of your backdoors and the cleverness of your inserted vulnerabilities. It important that the backdoors are covert enough such that regular users (both voters and election officials) cannot find them, while knowledgeable ones can. Hide them well!
  6. Supporting documents (10 points). The instructor will install your voting machine from scratch following your submitted installation manual. The instructor will also check the completeness of your user manual.

Your total score on the demo, out of 100 points, will form 15% of your final grade in the course.

Presentation

Presentations will occur in class on the presentation day. After each presentation, the group whose voting machine was red teamed in the previous presentation will go next. You must attend the entire presentation day to receive credit for your presentation. Please remain engaged with the presentations even after yours is complete. To assist with this, no electronics will be allowed during presentations.

The presentation will be graded as follows:

  1. Voting machine discussion (10 points). Your presentation should include a brief discussion on your voting machine’s design and features, from the perspective of how legitimate users would interact with your system.
  2. Backdoor discussion (20 points). Your presentation should detail the backdoors you included in your voting machine, such as where you hid them, how to exploit them, and what they do to compromise the result of the election.
  3. Red team voting machine analysis (20 points). Your presentation should describe the voting machine you received for analysis. This should focus on its code architecture (rather than its functionality). Make sure to highlight what techniques you used to analyze the machine.
  4. Red team vulnerability discussion (20 points). Your presentation should identify the vulnerabilities you found as a result of your analysis. The presentation should emphasize those vulnerabilities that are potential backdoors, and what impact those backdoors could have.
  5. Red team backdoor exploitation (10 points). Your presentation should prove that the backdoors you found indeed changes the outcome of the election. This can take the form of a series of screenshots that go through the process step-by-step, a recorded video demo, or a live demo.
  6. Presentation quality (20 points). The instructor will assess the effort you put into your presentation. Make sure you spend some time polishing your slides and practicing your presentation parts. A rule of thumb: if you are bored giving your presentation, you are boring your audience!

Your total score on the presentation, out of 100 points, will form 10% of your final grade in the course.

Check-ins

At various milestones in the project, the instructor will assign small check-in activities in class. These check-ins are designed to see if your group is on-track to complete the project on time. There will be 4 check-ins, accompanied by in-class work time for your group:

  1. Voting machine design and implementation
  2. Backdoors in your voting machine
  3. Demo practice
  4. Red team analysis

These check-ins are graded only for completion, and in total will form 5% of your final grade in the course. If you are struggling during the check-ins, make sure to reach out for help!

Attribution

The original version of this project was developed for the course Security & Privacy in Computing at Johns Hopkins University. More information can be found in “Root the (Ballot) Box: Designing Security Engineering Courses with E-Voting”, a poster published in the proceedings of the ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education 2024 (SIGCSE ’24).