- [Sam] Hello, I'm Sam Visner.
I'm the director of the National Cybersecurity
Federally Funded Research and Development Center,
which is operated by the MITRE corporation.
And I'm thrilled and honored today to be joined
by Secretary Michael Chertoff of The Chertoff Group.
As you may know, Secretary Chertoff was secretary
of the United States Department of Homeland Security
from 2005 to 2009.
So it's a delight to be able to work with you today,
Secretary Chertoff.
- [Michael] Good.
- [Sam] What we wanna do today is talk
about election security.
And I think it's important to do a little bit
of level-setting.
There is a lot of material floating out there,
information, and perhaps not very good information,
about election security.
And I think it's our duty to be clear about these issues
right from the start.
At a recent election security event,
someone asked how it was possible for the Russians
to hack into voting machines
to change vote tallies in 2016.
And I could hardly believe it.
Could you help level-set what really happened
in the 2016 election, Secretary Chertoff?
- [Michael] Yeah, I think there are three separate things.
I'm not aware of actual votes being changed
or hacking into voting machines,
which I think, to be honest, would be quite difficult
certainly at scale.
I think there were three things that did happen.
There was certainly malware attributed to the Russians
found in some of the voter databases in some of the states.
It's not clear that anything was changed,
but it looks like it might've been reconnaissance.
There was also disinformation,
information being put out to create volatility or antagonism
in order to kind of drive people's thought processes
about the election.
That's not, strictly speaking, hacking.
It's more manipulation of the information domain.
And then there was hacking
into the Democratic National Committee database
and the release of some documents
through what we call doxing on Wikipedia,
which again was designed to inflame people's anger
and a sense of disunion
but wasn't actually hacking into the mechanics
of the infrastructure itself.
- [Sam] I understand.
Well, this is kind of tampering, though, is problematic.
I think a number of people are concerned
about the integrity of election data.
And if there's any question about the integrity of it,
about whether or not it's accurate,
whether or not it's been tampered with,
that can undermine confidence in the election process.
That's been an area in which we focus,
and one of the concerns I've had,
it's an attack on, essentially, confidentiality,
integrity, and availability,
the possibility, for example,
that ransomware could be used against a component of this.
But from your perspective,
why do you think data integrity is really so crucial
to the elections process?
- [Michael] I think that if there were a serious attack
on a database or information about who's registered to vote,
that might essentially disqualify
or impede the ability of people to actually cast their vote.
And if that was strategically targeted
at particular locations,
it might actually have an effect on the election
because nowadays with modern data collection
and data analytics,
it's pretty clear what areas tend to go blue
and what tend to go red.
Even if there was a question,
that would raise issues about legitimacy
and whether there was rigging of the election.
So preserving the integrity of the registration system
is a critical part of the whole electroral process.
- [Sam] Thank you.
By the way, we're working in MITRE
on this issue in particular.
We've developed a set of recommendations
and a reference architecture
to be able to improve the cybersecurity
of voter registration database systems
exactly for the reason you outlined,
to make sure that people have confidence
that the votes that are being counted
represent the people who should be voting,
where they should be voting,
in the election in which they should be voting.
Secretary Chertoff, I'd like to move on
to a second topic within the question of election integrity,
and that is recovery and resilience.
One of the things we talk about
in our voter registration systems is recovery,
is the ability, if there is a cyber security problem,
to be able to sustain operations
and to recover such that confidence is not impaired.
Local governments across the United States
have been hit with ransomware.
We've seen that in a number of metropolitan areas.
And if that should, for some reason,
extend to voter registration systems,
we need the ability to recover quickly
and to continue operations such that confidence
in the process is not in fact damaged.
Resiliency is so important particularly with elections.
And if we look at what happened in, for example,
during the Iowa caucuses recently,
even if the app hadn't worked,
tallying in the general operations should still have worked.
What are some of the important resiliency concepts
or activities, and in your view,
state and local election officials
should be undertaking now.
- [Michael] Well, for one is backing up the data.
I mean, the essence of ransomware is that you,
the adversary locks down your data
and makes it inaccessible.
That means you wanna be frequently backing up the data
on a separate disconnected database
so that if all of a sudden, you don't have access
to your primary database,
or you don't have confidence in it,
you can go to your backup database.
Second thing you need is you need the ability then
to communicate that data to the people in the field
who are actually dealing with the voters
so they can verify the voter registration.
And again, that may mean an alternative pathway
or method of communication and preferably one out of BAT,
not using the same emails or the same linkages.
And finally, you need a plan.
People need to understand what would happen if,
on the day of the election, there were a major lockdown.
So you've gotta take people through it.
They've gotta understand roles and responsibilities,
and they've gotta even exercise a little bit
what they would do.
- [Sam] Thank you, and I couldn't agree more.
In fact, I wanna make people aware
that there is some guidance that's been published.
It's in the public domain,
by the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
And it provides detailed information
on how to detect, how to respond,
and how to recover from ransomware.
And people listening to this podcast can Google NIST,
N-I-S-T data integrity, and they can find this guidance.
I like to move on to sort of the last topic for the day.
And that's the question of disinformation and deep fakes.
We're seeing that with elections and election security.
We're seeing that as well, by the way,
in the context of the current COVID-19.
I saw some recent news from McAfee
about the state domains and voter information sites
being potential targets for attacks
and for deliberate disinformation and deep fakes.
And essentially what we're learning is
that malicious actors can set up fake websites
and harm the integrity of our elections
by distributing false information,
everything from relative, something small, like,
hey, this election site will be closed,
but people can move to another one which doesn't exist,
and people therefore don't get to vote,
to information about candidates that is patently false,
but it's crafted to look true.
The advice to combat this is fairly simple,
ensure you're using a .gov website domain.
But this leads me to thinking about what the future
of election security looks like.
I know you're doing work in this area.
How will advances in technology change, Secretary Chertoff,
the nature of election security work?
And are we ready for it,
particularly in this area of disinformation and deep fakes?
- [Michael] This is very challenging because, first of all,
disinformation covers a broad range of things.
I mean, in some ways the easiest thing to address
is the question of somebody spoofing a website
and putting false information up
on what is an official website.
And there are ways you can secure the domain
so that it doesn't happen.
What's harder is when social media is manipulated
to generate false messages
or to affect the way people think about the election.
There are algorithms that are being developed
to try to determine when you have a concerted effort
to manipulate social media
in order to drive certain messages.
But to be honest, it's kind of a tennis match.
The bad guys come up with new techniques,
and there are also serious First-Amendment issues
about the ability of the government, for example,
to intervene to suppress what are false messages.
In many ways now what we're seeing
is the adversary simply exploit
divisions within our own society.
We're seeing that now with the coronavirus
where you have a segment of society
that doesn't believe in medicine,
doesn't believe in vaccine.
And they're either saying that this is all a conspiracy,
or they're suggesting preposterous remedies
which can be fatal.
If you actually think about the deep-fakes issue,
that's kind of a subset.
And that has to do with,
it's kind of a super version of Photoshopping
where someone would create a fictitious audio
and video that looks genuine
and try to make it seem, for example,
that a candidate was saying
and doing something really outrageous and awful.
We're trying now to work with technology companies
to see if there's a way to determine
that that is a false, deep-fake upload.
And either you can do it by watermarking real photographs
and real audio so that in the absence of watermark,
you know something is phony.
Or there may be algorithms
and machine learning that allow you to detect imperfections
in the deep fake and expose it.
But here again, it's going to be a back and forth
because every time we discover a flaw in the deep fakes,
the architects of the deep fakes correct the flaw.
- [Sam] Well, this has been a real problem.
People at MITRE I've been working
on an application called SQUINT that allows users,
for example, in state or local governments
for election officials
or now people working on COVID-19 to do a screenshot,
a screen capture of suspected false information
and send it to an analytic engine,
which looks at possible attribution and heuristics
and gives you a sense of whether or not
it's probably false or probably true.
But certainly as adversaries become more skillful,
this is gonna become a larger problem.
Secretary Chertoff,
you've been very, very generous with your time,
and it's been, as always, a pleasure to speak with you.
And it's certainly an honor to do so.
Do you have any closing thoughts
that you'd like to share with us?
- [Michael] Well, I think that what we're seeing
with the coronavirus in some ways is a dry run
for some of the issues we would face in the election.
And, in fact, it's quite possible that,
as of the date of the election on November 3rd,
if the virus returns as many believe it will,
there may be an effort to combine the two
in a disinformation campaign
in order to discourage certain kinds of people from voting.
So what I think this teaches us is we need to look
at the media and social media platforms
with a certain degree of skepticism.
We also need to educate people
as to how to use critical thinking to validate
or refute what are efforts to manipulate us.
And then, of course, at the end of the day,
the infrastructure is critical.
We are now moving more and more to online work.
That I think will,
even when the virus is gone because of vaccinations,
I think that will continue to be the case to some degree
for a whole lot of reasons.
And therefore we need to make sure the infrastructure
on which we are operating our networks
can deal with the additional traffic
and the additional stress.
And to be honest,
I'm seeing now with some of what we're doing online,
that there is a lot of strain on the system.
So I think that's gonna be a major issue to focus on.
- [Sam] Thank you.
Well, I think that's absolutely right.
We're been thinking.
I was in a discussion earlier today
about what will it take to operate in a new normal
in which, as business comes back online,
and we try to resume more of our normal economic activities,
we do so, however, with continued social distancing
and operating at a distance
and how much more dependent we're going to be
on our online resources for administering elections,
for going after COVID-19,
and for our routine business
and how much additional vulnerability
we may have to deal with
and how much more vigilant
and responsible enterprises will have to be
as well as individuals.
Let me close by reminding people
that if you're a state and local officials
who wanna find out more about The Chertoff Group,
please visit chertoffgroup.com.
If someone is interested in the work that MITRE is doing
about voter registration security,
please Google or use your favorite search engine
and look for MITRE voter registration,
M-I-T-R-E voter registration, to find our guy.
Secretary Chertoff, again I wanna thank you.
You've been very generous with your time.
These are powerful and useful insights.
I urge people at the state and local level
and those who are charged with the security
of our critical enterprises to pay close attention
to this conversation,
particularly to Secretary Chertoff's words.
And with that, thank you very much.
- [Michael] And everybody stay safe.
- [Sam] Thank you, and stay safe,
but particularly for those, our first responders,
and those on whom we depend.
Thank you. - Yeah.