The Diebold Voting-Machine Hack

Warm John writes to mention a short article on Doctor Dobbs Journal about the Hack that couldn't be done. "Hacking a Diebold voting machine was the focus of Cigital's Gary McGraw's keynote at SD Best Practices. He discussed 'Security Analysis of the Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting Machine,' a paper released by Edward Felten, Ari Feldman, and Alex Halderman of the Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy. 'The paper details a simple method whereby the Princeton team was able to compromise the physical security of a Diebold voting machine, infecting it with a virus that could change voting results and spread by memory-card to other machines of the same type.'"

Scary

[sm62704]

In Illinois we get a paper printout that you check for accuracy and put in a ballot box; we can actually have a real recount.

That's incredibly weird, considering this IS Illinois, where they say "vote early, vote often," where dead people still have a right to vote, and the last two governors who lost elections went to prison (or will, in the case of Ryan).

Re:Could be modded as flamebait...

[nezroy]

http://www.openvotingconsortium.org/ [openvotingconsortium.org]

Uh...

[raehl]

and the last two governors who lost elections went to prison (or will, in the case of Ryan).

Ryan didn't lose an election - he won, all the way up until he (plagued with scandal) didn't run again.

Re:Soo..

[OWJones]

Thank you for stealing an earlier post of mine [slashdot.org] absolutely verbatim.

-the real jdm

Re:Money more important than a fair vote?

[XorNand]

Actually, *all* corporations pay taxes. Some may not income taxes, but they certainly pay other taxes (or their members do). In fact, corporate taxes account for around 7% of the US's GDP. While that's somewhat concerning because as late as the 1960's, corporate taxation accounted for 25% of the GPD, it certainly isn't "no taxes".

Also keep in mind that the vast majority of corporations are small businesses (can't find a citation ATM). That's important because small businesses employ 52% of the workers in the US and create 65% of the net new jobs. But even if you qualify your hating to "big corporations" (however you define that line), it doesn't really advance the argument. The computer you're now using wouldn't exist without corporations. Neither would many of the other benefits modern society offers that are taken advantage of daily by the same people who criticize capitalism.

I'm not saying much of corporate America doesn't suck. I'm a former refugee myself, who's since left to run his own company. But the mindless corporate bashing that is a regular mantra here at Slashdot is just plain mental laziness.

Sources:
http://www.cbpp.org/10-16-03tax.htm [cbpp.org]
http://usinfo.state.gov/products/pubs/oecon/chap4. htm [state.gov]
http://www.fedex.com/us/about/news/speeches/greate raccess.html [fedex.com]

Diebold is commited to delivering the results

[Anonymous Coward]

Jeez, just use google and search for "diebold ohio". If our free and democratic society can't have an open election process, then we'll have neither. Those high priced calculators are owned by a group of people openly committed to another group of people. No one owns the pencil and paper.

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0828-08.ht [commondreams.org] m [commondreams.org]

http://rawstory.rawprint.com/105/blackwell_campaig [rawprint.com] n_letter2_105.php [rawprint.com]

Army of One

[Doc Ruby]

Ed Felten is also the guy who hacked the MS DLL that "integrated" IE into Windows to remove IE without destroying the OS, proving in court that Microsoft's defense of their illegal bundling, "it was technologically necessary", was a lie. Though Felten was not even a Windows specialist, and certainly didn't have the source code to delete IE cleanly, he was the the key to the court finding that MS had violated their antibundling consent agreement, the key to finding they'd violated their monopoly status.

Now he's the guy proving Diebold voting systems are insecure.

Isn't anyone else in our giant, brilliant "computer science" industry doing anything? Or are they all working for the bad guys?

Re:Money more important than a fair vote?

[daspriest]

Hardened boxes, tamper proof without proper tools and procedures, along with 2 person integrity with the machines from vault(with two person integrity locks), to polling place(with machine integrity testing occuring on each machine by a not for profir third party), to counting facility, back to the vault with signature transfers all the way from start to finish. Seems like it would be worth the trouble to ensure that the voting results are properly recorded and reported.

I think it sad and scary that the results of the Television awards shows have tighter security then any of the process of the democratic elections.

MOD DOWN, cut & paste karma whore

[Anonymous Coward]

Post copied from here [slashdot.org].

Stop modding this douchebag up.

Re:Who would want to tamper? Terrorists

[Mjlner]

Quite funny, but Bin Laden would never speak of "the capitalist pig masses" of the US. He hates communism as much as the most hardline republican in the US, if not more. He is a religious fanatic, while communism is usually coupled with the idea of a secular state. And, oh yeah, he actually fought the Soviet Union.

Re:Money more important than a fair vote?

[complete loony]

Just a little more perspective on the Australian system.

We vote for the lower house and the PM by voting for one person (with a preference based system, where you number each box 1 - n) in fairly small districts. As with the US this devolves into a 2 party system, though some independant candidates are elected from time to time, and can sometimes hold the balance of power.

The upper house is voted at the state level, again by a preference system. And while this is dominated by the 2 main parties, it operates more like a popular vote. If your party gets a sufficient percentage of the total vote, you get a seat in the senate. Every man and his dog seems to register a party for the senate since they have a better chance of getting in. This makes the actual voting difficult as you would have to enter a number into all 50 odd boxes. So there's a box on the top of the form where you can specify to vote using the parties preferences.

Unfortunately, at the moment a single party has the majority of seats in both the lower and upper house. This has allowed the PM to pass all sorts of crazy laws ;).