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Diebold Voting Machines Vulnerable to Virus Attack
Posted by
Zonk
on Sat Aug 04, 2007 03:24 PM
from the maybe-they-should-install-macafee dept.
from the maybe-they-should-install-macafee dept.
mcgrew writes "PC world is reporting that Diebold's super-popular voting machines are coming under even more scrutiny. A security review has revealed that they are simply 'not secure enough to guarantee a trustworthy election.' This is according to a report from the University of California Berkley, who did a two-month top-to-bottom review of all California e-voting systems. That's a subject we've discussed before, but Diebold's setup is truly unsettling. An attacker with access to a single machine could disrupt or change the outcome of an entire election using viruses. From the article: 'The report warned that a paper trail of votes cast is not sufficient to guarantee the integrity of an election using the machines. "Malicious code might be able to subtly influence close elections, and it could disrupt elections by causing widespread equipment failure on election day," it said. The source-code review went on to warn that commercial antivirus scanners do not offer adequate protection for the voting machines. "They are not designed to detect virally propagating malicious code that targets voting equipment and voting software," it said.' Oddly, my state of Illinois, long known for election fraud, has paper trails (at least in my county) and according to Black Box Voting doesn't use Diebold anywhere."
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IT: Researchers Crack Every Certified CA Voting Machine 154 comments
ewhac writes "The San Francisco Chronicle is reporting that computer security researchers throughout the University of California system managed to crack the security on every voting machine they tested that has been approved for use in the state. The researchers are unwilling to say how vulnerable the machines are, as the tests were conducted in an environment highly advantageous to the testers. They had complete access to the devices' source code and unlimited time to try and crack the machines. No malicious code was found in any of the machines, but Matt Bishop, who led the team from UC Davis, was surprised by the weakness of the security measures employed. The tests were ordered by Secretary of State Debra Bowen, who has until Friday of next week to decide whether to decertify any of the machines for use in the upcoming Presidential primary election."
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waht we've all been wondering... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:waht we've all been wondering... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I'd respond by pointing out that we don't yet have electronic voting in Australia. We use pencil and paper, and the results of an election are normally available several hours after the close of voting.
At this year's federal election there will be a tri
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
About 10 years ago in the City of Maroondah I received in the mail about five ballot papers addressed to names like "Jon Q Citizen, Jane C Jones", etc at my address. It
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Adding numbers within a layer is a parallelizeable problem. It can certainly be handled in a pyramid such that the height of the pyramid increases no faster than the l
Re:waht we've all been wondering... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:waht we've all been wondering... (Score:5, Funny)
god help the future of democracy.
List of Diebold Vulnerabilities (Score:3, Funny)
Sneezing in their vicinity,
Looking at them cross eyed,
Armpit farts,
Dancing counterclockwise around them,
Voting,
Sarcastic comments,
Pixie dust,
My mothe
Re: (Score:2)
And people wonder how in the last election the exit polls somehow didn't agree with the final vote counts.
It's
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Holey shiiiittt! (Score:2)
Why bother even going.
So they tally way more votes that voters... Hwo gives a fuck?
It would
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Programming Visual Basic over Access is first year Windows programming. I took this class, and I just wanted a networking education - worked out however sinc
Re: (Score:2)
If one makes the foolish initial decision to use an inherently untrustable device like a computer in the first place, then it comes down to one's choice of an operating system. Diebold chose Windows [zazzle.com]
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
MisUnderestimate (Score:5, Insightful)
This is not the typical play stupid situation that sells so well in the USA. This is clear-cut intentional negligence and I shouldn't need to go into the many possible motives for anybody to pull such scams. This isn't even that other large voting machine company who elected their own OWNER!
The difficulty is NOT making a computer COUNT or securing the totals, they distract you with the irrelevant technical details. Its in WHO YOU TRUST to implement, maintain, and secure the system that is the unsolvable difficulty (I for one, will welcome our evolved computer overlords when they take over...)
The ultimate purpose for Rube Goldberg designs is POWER (job security and customer lock in being most common motives.) When you place the power in the hands of a few you always run into trouble. IRONICALLY, the purpose for democratic voting is totally being forgotten in this pseudo debate about how the publicly inaccessible voting system operates!
Canada figured it out; however, I'd like to see a weighted voting system well implemented. Also, I would like to see a new kind of elector system so my friends can just give me their votes; its hard enough to get them to the polls on a WORK DAY... (yes, the pro-"democracy" USA never respected democracy enough to make election day on par with memorial day. Irony has become redundant.) While I'm at it, I'd like senators to go back to state appointment because the intent was to prevent an all powerful federal government.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Pretty f*cking hard, I expect. The problem is roughly equivalent to making a secure DRM system, which everyone on Slashdot claims is near-impossible. In both cases, you need to give someone physica
Re:waht we've all been wondering... (Score:4, Funny)
Bonus points if you can write it in INTERCAL [catb.org].
Re:what we've all been wondering... (Score:4, Insightful)
I cannot see WHY they feel they have to network them to accumulate the results. Best way to propagate a virus: wire them all together (or, worse, through the internet - however "secure" the connection).
I still can't see anything wrong with using the machines to accumulate the votes and then polling each machine, by hand, to copy the tallies - having enough witnesses from all parties will keep the results accurate and they can still be communicated to the appropriate location as they've always been.
I thought the main purpose of new machines over the older mechanical ones was the reduction of complexity of the machines (hence increasing their reliability), accessibility by the handicapped, and ease of recounting (just run the forms through another scanner and see if they total identically) - at least that's the line parroted by our idiot secretary of state (bysiewicz, Connecticut).
It's obvious that machines wired to each other can be more completely tampered-with than individual machines, SO WHY DO IT?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Not very hard. But such a system would not be based on Windows or any normal version of Linux, or any other such operating system. The underlying code should be programmed as firmware which means
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Is it just me (Score:2)
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I w
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Yup, especially when the eds (hello Zonk...) don't read (see
Of course you're right that, as news comes in, new information germane to th
Re:Is it just me (Score:4, Insightful)
However, I think self-redacting/auto-revising article text is a bad idea. Have you ever lurked on (for example) the Associated Press feed and watch an article headline slowly morph from "Bush puts off decision" to "Bush faces tough decision" and finally end up as "Bush makes decision" while the text, in which he clearly puts off the decision, stays static? I have. Or worse yet, both the headline and the body texts change according to an agenda.
There is pressure being brought on news agencies to make those changes, which are becoming commonplace. This is the danger of Internet publication in the information age. It becomes unreliable. It's too easy to change it.
So I prefer a news feed to retain previous revisions so I can get a good idea of the reliability of the news source. If there's an update, I expect it to be published as a separate note, not superseding the article text in place. I expect the act of publication to have permanent consequences, not be an act that you can wash away with something more responsible at a later date.
My expectation, of course, is not realistic. It is borne of growing up with a print media. The only logical expectation is that Internet publication will be abused, and that "print media" is now less reliable, because it is no longer in print. I only ask that you understand the consequences of your demand that Slashdot "clean up" their articles. Your desire for "clean" can rapidly turn into an engine for censorship and yellow journalism.
I can assure you of one thing: that CowboyNeal's article will fall off the bottom of the page soon enough, and you can then feel at ease.
--
Toro
Diebold dupe? (Score:2)
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/04/14
Even worse (Score:5, Informative)
it gets worse (Score:2)
Awesome! (Score:2)
I wonder if UC Berkley would recommend *BSD? (Score:2, Insightful)
(Any number of non-windows OSes would fit, but the *BSD family just fits so well here.)
Edison was still wrong (Score:3, Insightful)
If you ask me, it's just pointless. Why can't the state government(s) just get rid of the machines and reinstate the good ol' paper votes like they used to? Do they REALLY want to keep on using Diebold machines and/or voting machines in general?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
idea for an absolutely secure voting machine. (Score:5, Interesting)
Voting consists of dropping the Uranium into one of several lead boxes which contain giant magnets to keep someone from trying to alter votes by moving tokens from one box to another. At the end of the day, you read the results digitally with a geiger counter. Every party can be there with representatives, disagreements can be sorted out on the spot with a manual count in front of a multiparty committee. 100% foolproof.
Basically, I got the idea from Bruce Schnier, who observed that it's not such a bad idea for people to keep their passwords written down on a piece of paper in their wallet. After all, people already know how to keep their wallets secure.
The US Military already knows how to keep weapons-grade plutonium secure. Basically, my idea is to just piggy-back on that, to keep voting secure.
A lot of people like to stick with old, low-tech stuff, don't have the will to try anything new. "What about the radiation poisoning" they would no doubt whine. Well I say progress consists in throwing out what's old and "safe" and being bold. [diebold.com]
Here's mine (Score:3, Interesting)
As Stalin might say (Score:2)
Also how will you stop someone from slipping in a beryllium ballot? It won't trip the Geiger counters on the way in and in the presence of alpha radiation it fissions
And the mushroom cloud goes (Score:2)
Where are you planning to have a CRITICAL MASS of voters?
I think I would give your voting booth a wide berth.
I can just imagine the reporters covering the explosion. (Well some of them will be doing it from afar and claiming a victory for Al Queda.
Super-popular?! (Score:2)
Why the hell use a "real" computer? (Score:3, Interesting)
Insecure (Score:2, Interesting)
And if so, should this not call into question the legitimacy of the reigning monar^H^H^H^H democratically elected Shrub on Penns
USA geeks please take action (Score:3, Insightful)
Please, if you are a USA geek and care about the integrity of your democracy, force the public to take notice. You think they are going to care if people say that something is theoretically possible? No, they think it's a conspiracy theorist, or, at best, "The government would never let that happen, would they? I'm sure somebody is taking care of it." The only way to fix this is to make the public realise that this directly affects them. Otherwise they are too apathetic and myopic to do anything about it.
So rig the next election. And I don't mean for Mickey Mouse, that can easily be caught and covered up on the day. It has to be a landslide for a believable candidate. Write an encrypted letter to your local newspapers beforehand that explains what you are going to do and how you are going to do it. Leave a marker on the system to prove that you were there, and mention it in the letter. After the election, send them the key that decrypts the letter, proving that the recent landslide was totally rigged. For bonus points, own up to it instead of doing it anonymously, but only do this if you have an impeccable public persona. Rosa Parks wouldn't have had quite the impact she did if she dealt weed on the side.
If you don't do this, somebody less honest than you will. They may already have done it. The only people who can solve this are honest American geeks.
DUPLICATE (Score:2, Informative)
Please post a story about the Secretary of State's decision [ca.gov] restricting the use of these machines.
Three systems were reviewed. (Score:3, Informative)
Shhhh, God damn it. There does my bid to get (Score:2)
Do you realize how many favors he would have owed me?
I would have been able to sleep with ALL of his sisters AND his mother AT THE SAME TIME.
Aw squat...
Re: (Score:2)
Dubya's little brother made sure FL has diebold. (Score:2, Informative)
in 2000, Volusia County, FL had one precinct count up (er down) -16,000 votes for Al Gore. That's Negative Sixteen Thousand.
It was allowed to pass in the final
New slogan (Score:2)
On the other hand, with a screwup like this, maybe Ron Paul will get the majority of votes on election day. Or maybe a write-in candidate like Micke
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The catch is, the fraud that you would be committing (registering as a non-citizen) would only affect the election by at most 1 vo
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And yet this is just want the GP-post wants — a centralized s
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No, I thought of it when I stole an election last year. I only d
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