An 'Off-the-Shelf, Skeleton Project': Experts Analyze the App That Broke Iowa

[LiberalArkie]

The app used to report early results in Iowa's Democratic Presidential primary caucus was rudimentary in many ways, according to analyses by multiple Android app development experts and cybersecurity professionals who decompiled and studied the app after it was obtained by Motherboard.

The app, called IowaReporterApp and developed by a company called Shadow Inc., malfunctioned during the caucus, causing mass chaos and delaying the public reporting of results until Tuesday evening. The app was designed to rapidly report early results, not tabulate final vote counts. That means its failure will not result in the election result being altered.

But, until now, very little has been published about how the app was designed, how it was supposed to work, and what went wrong on caucus night.

Motherboard asked six cybersecurity and app development experts we trust to analyze the app. The app was built on top of React Native, an open-source app development package released by Facebook that can be used for both Android and iOS apps, according to Kasra Rahjerdi, who has been an Android developer since the original Android project was launched, and Robert Baptise, a white-hat hacker who has exposed security flaws in many popular apps and reviewed the code. Rahjerdi said that the app contains default React Native metadata and that it comes off as a "very very off the shelf skeleton project plus add your own code kind of thing."

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https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/3a8ajj/an-off-the-shelf-skeleton-project-experts-analyze-the-app-that-broke-iowa?utm_source=digg

[dalton99a]

1. "The DNC's chief security officer directly urged Iowa democrats to not use the Shadow app"

"The Open Source Election Technology Institute publicly warned the IDP against using the app"

WTF

[gratuitous]

2. So how did Shadow, Inc. get this contract?

Everyone screws up from time to time, but the overriding question for me is how did the Iowa Democratic Party come to hire Shadow, Inc. to create this app? Somebody's brother's wife's hairdresser's nephew? Who interviewed Shadow, and reviewed their previous work? What kind of testing did the app go through before going live on caucus night?

This was a debacle with a capital D. How do you avoid making this kind of mistake in the future?

[LiberalArkie]

3. I think that is the way politics works. Look at the White House.

How did Iowa, Nevada and probably others hear about Shadow? Someone at the DNC's 1st cousin, twice removed boyfriends brother-in-law?