A major vulnerability has been found in the Diebold voting machines. I can’t say that I didn’t see this coming.
Elections officials in several states are scrambling to understand and limit the risk from a “dangerous” security hole found in Diebold Election Systems Inc.’s ATM-like touch-screen voting machines.
The hole is considered more worrisome than most security problems discovered on modern voting machines, such as weak encryption, easily pickable locks and use of the same, weak password nationwide.
Armed with a little basic knowledge of Diebold voting systems and a standard component available at any computer store, someone with a minute or two of access to a Diebold touch screen could load virtually any software into the machine and disable it, redistribute votes or alter its performance in myriad ways.
“This one is worse than any of the others I’ve seen. It’s more fundamental,” said Douglas Jones, a University of Iowa computer scientist and veteran voting-system examiner for the state of Iowa.
“In the other ones, we’ve been arguing about the security of the locks on the front door,” Jones said. “Now we find that there’s no back door. This is the kind of thing where if the states don’t get out in front of the hackers, there’s a real threat.”
This newspaper is withholding some details of the vulnerability at the request of several elections officials and scientists, partly because exploiting it is so simple and the tools for doing so are widely available.
The argument can be made that these machines do not adhere to FIPS 140-2 certification but, more importantly. Did Bush actually win?
Reference: Link
Reference: Link
Reference: Link
[tags]Diebold, Vulnerability, Voting Machines[/tags]
