$82 Buys E-Voting Secrets, anyone else scared?

It has been quite a while since my last post, however I assure you life has been anything but boring. Anyways, Check out these snippets from a wired article about voting machine hacking. I'm glad to see someone in academia is testing these things and not the companies themselves. Its about time, took long enough! Still a very scary thought however.



Till next time, hope it won't be so long!

By Kim Zetter, Wired News

02:00 AM Feb, 16, 2007

"For a mere $82 a computer scientist and electronic voting critic managed to purchase five $5,000 Sequoia electronic voting machines over the internet last month from a government auction site. And now he's taking them apart.

Princeton computer science professor Andrew Appel and his students have begun reverse-engineering the software embedded in the machines' ROM chips to determine if it has any security holes. But Appel says the ease with which he and his students opened the machines and removed the chips already demonstrates that the voting machines are vulnerable to unauthorized modification."

He then goes on to compare his testing with that of a fellow Princeton prof who has done work on the Diebold machines.

"Appel said the Sequoia machines he bought so far seem to be more secure than a Diebold voting machine that Princeton colleague Ed Felten and others examined last year. Felton discovered that he could inject subversive software into the Diebold machine through the removable memory cards on which it stores votes. He could even produce a virus that would spread automatically from one Diebold machine to another."

Check out the full article here at wired.com

Technorati Tags: Voting, Diebold, wired, fraud, hacking

powered by performancing firefox