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The Diebold Voting-Machine Hack
Posted by
Zonk
on Thu Sep 14, 2006 05:33 PM
from the don't-say-can't-because-you-can dept.
from the don't-say-can't-because-you-can dept.
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.'"
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IT: Hotel Minibar Key Opens Diebold Voting Machines 341 comments
Billosaur writes, "As if Diebold doesn't have enough to worry about! On the Freedom To Tinker blog, Ed Felten, one of the co-authors of the recent report 'Security Analysis of the Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting Machine', reveals an even more bizarre finding related to the initial report. It turns out that you can gain access to an AccuVote-TS machine using a hotel minibar key. In fact, the key in question is a utilitarian type used to open office furniture, electronic equipment, jukeboxes, and the like. They might as well hand them out like candy."
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Politics: Maryland Fights to Keep E-voting 250 comments
crystalattice writes "Apparently Maryland election officials never have computer problems. That's why they're fighting so hard to keep their Diebold e-voting machines. Washington Post reporter Marc Fisher received nothing but bad attitudes, dodges, and excuses when he attempted to discuss the issue with the state elections administration and Diebold." From the article: "I asked the state's elections administrator, Linda Lamone, whether Maryland wasn't just a bit too quick to adopt electronic voting. Doesn't the computer at your desk ever freeze up on you? 'No,' she replied. Never? 'No.' But surely people in your office have had that experience? 'No.' (Maybe we've found the solution to Maryland's voting problem: Everybody head on down to Linda Lamone's office, where the machines work 100 percent of the time.)"
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meme seems appropriate (Score:5, Funny)
America Has A Rootkit (Score:5, Funny)
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Money more important than a fair vote? (Score:4, Insightful)
However, Demma seems more incensed at Funk because he may cost the state $40,000 for Diebold's astronomical recertification fee. He doesn't seem to be worried that people might not trust these machines. He doesn't seem to care that a state officer was worried enough to call in a non-profit third party to verify the integrity of these machines. I mean, these things could possibly affect the outcome of a vote, the foundation for a democratic republic! But instead of worrying about these machines he's clearly more upset about the $40,000 and Funk not talking to him about his concerns regarding the voting machines.
And of COURSE Diebold is going to tell you the machines are fine and fair. Sheesh, they want to make money don't they?
Isn't it great that chief elections officers have their priorities straight?
Give me a ballot sheet and a pencil any day over these closed, proprietary black box machines.
Re:Money more important than a fair vote? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Money more important than a fair vote? (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody in their right mind who understands what's going on can condone the existence of closed-source software in the vote counting or vote taking process at all, whether by Diebold or otherwise.
If elections officials told the public, "We're going to count by a secret counting method and we won't tell you how we're going to count; you'll just have to trust us that we picked the right person for the job," the public would burn down city hall. Unfortunately, the public hasn't yet realized that this is exactly what is happening....
Anybody want to raise money for a front page ad in the NY Times? Maybe with a little extra money left over to donate to local fire departments? :-)
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Re:Money more important than a fair vote? (Score:5, Funny)
If elections officials told the public, "To protect your Freedom we are going to count by an undisclosed counting method and we won't help terrorists by telling the evildoers how we're going to protect the public and count the votes; you'll just have to support our troops and the person we picked for the job," the public would greet you as liberators
There, corrected it for ya.
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Re:Money more important than a fair vote? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Money more important than a fair vote? (Score:5, Insightful)
Huh? Diebold is certifying its own machines? To say that this is like the fox guarding the henhouse would be a gross oversimplification...it's more like the fox has control of a large percentage of the henhouses throughout the country, and is working diligently to ensure this does not change.
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Scary (Score:5, Informative)
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).
The first person to do this is going to be stupid (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:The first person to do this is going to be stup (Score:5, Interesting)
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Unfortunately, "so what?" may be the response (Score:4, Interesting)
I hope that I underestimate the American people on this (including me), because the next tack that will be taken by Diebold will be, "Well, who in their right mind would want to tamper with an election? Calm down, citizens, this is just scaremongering by the right/left/pedestrians..." Once this is followed up with a suggestion that such might be "fomenting a panic designed to cause a breach of the peace," vague threats of arrest for those involved, and nothing changing.
Well, if nothing else, this voter's going to try his hand at absentee balloting this time around. Just in case...
Who would want to tamper? Terrorists (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Who would want to tamper? Terrorists (Score:5, Funny)
"While exit polls conducted by our station and others showed Sen. Hillary Clinton and Sen. John McCain neck-in-neck at nearly 50% in this highly contested state of Ohio, initial results from available precincts shows the winner of the state, and thus the country, as Osama bin Laden, with 107% of the vote. A tape allegedly featuring Mr. bin Laden was broadcast by the al Jazeera network just minutes ago, in which the terrorist mastermind said he was pleased by the clear mandate the capitalist pig masses had given him, and that he hoped his transition from a cave somewhere in Pakistan to the Oval Office would go smoothly. Back to you, Tom."
I don't know, think that would wake people up?
Parent
as we all know (Score:4, Funny)
It's not who votes that counts, it's who counts the votes.
We've heard it before but... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:We've heard it before but... (Score:5, Funny)
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The video is excellent (Score:5, Insightful)
It isn't enough for computer software professionals to discover problems like this; we need to be able to communicate our results effectively to the non-technical public. Too often we find something disturbing and decend into technical jargon and lose our audience. The Princeton team has done an excellent job avoiding that pitfall and communicating this threat.
Now, if only we could find a reasonably motivated and alert politician to actually act on this.
Army of One (Score:5, Informative)
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:The box was not production hardware... (Score:4, Interesting)
It does make a difference. With a punch card, or a paper ballot, or even a mechanical voting both anyone can trace when fraud has occured. And in those cases we implement some security, track where the fraud came from (if we can) and redo the election.
With the current generation of electronic voting machines, we can't do that. I don't care who makes a good machine, but Diebold hasn't made one. And they've defended that design as if they think it is a good machine. Geeks don't like people who pretend a bad design is a good design. We'll tear into them. If they routinely defend bad design by saying it is good design and overlooking what we think are obvious flaws we'll notice, and start to expect that. Until they change, a group that decides who they like on the technical ability of a company won't like them. They are lying about their technical quality; at least in our eyes.
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Re:The box was not production hardware... (Score:5, Interesting)
it's called 'peer review' and in the science world it's not only expected but mandatory.
my question is this: has diebold's product undergone any sort of peer review? if it's important enough for someone studying the genetic inheretance of grey hair, it's important enough for someone entrusted with running an election for the most powerful person in the world, dontcha think?
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Re:The box was not production hardware... (Score:5, Interesting)
One customer wants a secure, hardened, auditable, time proven machine with a user verifiable paper trail.
The other doesn't need any of those features.
Therefore two entirely disparate product lines.
One is designed to protect $.
The other is designed to protect democracy.
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Re:Could be modded as flamebait... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:firmware flash (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Soo.. (Score:5, Informative)
Thank you for stealing an earlier post of mine [slashdot.org] absolutely verbatim.
-the real jdm
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