On the Difficulty of Validating Voting Machine Software with Software

We studied the notion of human verification of software-based attestation, which we base on the Pioneer framework. We demonstrate that the current state of the art in software-based attestation is not sufficiently robust to provide humanly verifiable voting machine integrity in practice. We design and implement a selfattesting machine based on Pioneer and modify, and in some cases, correct the Pioneer code to make it functional and more secure. We then implement it into the GRUB bootloader [1], along with several other modifications, to produce a voting machine that authenticates and loads both the Diebold AccuVote-TS voting software as well as its underlying operating system. Finally, we implement an attack on the system that indicates that it is currently impractical for use and argue that as technology advances, the attack will likely become more effective.