Argonne researchers 'hack' Diebold e-voting system

Computerworld - Researchers at the Argonne National Laboratory this week showed how an electronic voting machine model that's expected to be widely used to tally votes in the 2012 elections can be easily hacked using inexpensive, widely-available electronic components.

Roger Johnston, head of the Vulnerability Assessment Team at the U.S. Department of Energy's science and engineering reseaech lab, said the hack, which requires about $25 and very little technical expertise, would let cybercriminals "flip" votes gathered on Diebold Accuvote TS machines and change election results without raising any suspicion.

Johnston and his team have long warned about vulnerabilities in e-voting machines. And two years ago, the team demonstrated how a Sequoia touch screen e-voting machine could be similarly manipulated using cheap components.

The latest research was first reported by the Salon news site.

In the latest experiment, the Argonne researchers showed how a Diebold Accuvote TS touch screen voting machine can be compromised by inserting a man-in-the middle electronic component to intercept the vote cast by a voter and change it before it is recorded by the system.

The component which is less than half the size of a credit card, was assembled using a $1.29 microprocessor and a homemade circuit board that cost less than $10 to assemble.

The handmade component, which Johnston calls "alien electronics," can be simply plugged into a ribbon cable inside the system. There is no need to solder it on to the system, he noted.

Once installed the "alien electronics" can be controlled remotely from a distance of up to a half mile using an ordinary store-brought $15 remote control.

Johnston said the machine is "incredibly easy to tamper with" because all the crucial electronic components are accessible and can be easily modified. The Accuvote TS' enclosure isn't tamper resistant so hjackers can work on the machine without leaving visible signs, he added.

"All we had to do was find out what the machine was doing in terms of communication," Johnston said. "We just had to understand the various components and how the data was being sent. We needed to understand what signal had to be sent to fool the machine into thinking the voter had touched the screen at a particular location."

The experiment shows that e-voting systems are susceptible to more than just cyberattacks, which get the most attention but are harder to pull off as the perpetrators must have some knowledge of the machine's software, hardware and firmware.

The so-called man-in-the-middle attacks don't require knowledge of the voting machine's proprietary software or hardware, Johnston said. "All you need to do is understand the communication between the different parts of the system. Then you just sit there and listen and do whatever mischief you want to.".