EAC - Voluntary Voting System Guidelines

Name : | Hugh Gallagher
Organization : | Election System & Management Services
Post Date : | 9/30/2005
Section Comments
Section : | 6
Page no. : |
Line no.: |
Comment : | The proposed voting system standards, Section 6.0 “Security” call for the use of the Advanced Encryption Standard, or Federal Information Processing Standard 197. Previous encryption standards for wireless relied on the Digital Encryption Standard know as DES, which was based on a 56-bit encryption standard. This standard remained secure for about 20 years’. But eventually, it became practical to mount a keyexhaustion attack, commonly referred to as “brute-force” to break the code. Brute force is a method in which attackers continually try ALL possible key values to break the encryption. But the Advanced Encryption Standard has a much larger key size – barring any attacks against AES that are faster than key exhaustion, and even with future advances in technology, AES has the potential to remain secure for will beyond 20 years’. [Statements submitted at EAC public hearing, July 28, 2005, Pasadena]