How Estonia Secures Its Electronic Elections From Kremlin Attacks
Americans fret a lot about the threat of a crippling cyber attack. But the small European country of Estonia lived through one, a 2007 Kremlin-led effort to destabilize the country by attacking government websites. Yet the experience only strengthened Estonians resolve to extend digital service to its people, most notably electronic voting.
Just two years before Russia’s attack, Estonia began a pilot program that essentially allows its citizens to vote from home or work. To many Americans, this seems to promise a solution to increasingly common election-day problems: long lines, fewer polling places, uneven hours, etc. Some 25 U.S. states are experimenting with some form of e-voting for military service members. But most U.S. citizens can’t do it, despite polls showing a strong preference for it, particularly among young voters.
The Estonians haven’t had any major problems with e-voting, thanks to pioneering approaches to securing elections and keeping digital records that have made its government a best-practices showcase. But not all of them are easily transferable to the United States.
To begin, everybody in Estonia has a unique national identification number, similar to a social security number. “Your vote is tied to your personal Identification number but kept away from the prying eyes of politicians and election officials, unless there’s a certain incident where they have to see what happened in one precinct or another. In any case, it’s secure,” Erki Kodar, Undersecretary for Legal and Admin Affairs at the Estonian Defense Ministry, said during a recent visit to his country’s embassy in Washington, D.C
That state-issued number works alongside a personal identification number chosen by each citizen. The two, together, form a lock and key relationship, authenticating one another. You log into the system with your state ID number and your PIN. Result: there’s no question of whether someone should be disqualified because of a dubious signature discrepancy. Instead, an individual uses their secret PIN with their state ID number to verify who they are. “In the sense of your PIN number, that’s your digital signature,” said Kodar.
https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2018/11/how-estonia-secures-its-electronic-elections-kremlin-attacks/152582/
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