Ads by TechWords

See your link here
Receive the latest technology news and information.
Security
Computerworld Daily News (First Look and Wrap-Up)
Computerworld Blogs Newsletter
The Weekly Top 10
Cloud Computing
View all newsletters




Privacy Policy
 

Sidebar: Studies Raised E-voting Concerns

October 18, 2004 12:00 PM ET

Computerworld - The issues of electronic voting system security and reliability first gained public attention in July 2003, when researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore published a detailed study of the software code used in the Diebold AccuVote-TS voting machine. The report's charges of a startling number of security vulnerabilities and a complete lack of adherence to industry-standard software design and testing methodologies put Diebold Election Systems and its direct recording electronic, or DRE, systems at the center of the debate about e-voting security and reliability.
Working under the direction of professor Aviel Rubin, computer science graduate students found the following:

  • No encryption protection for dial-up modem connections used to upload unofficial polling-station results.

  • A lack of encryption protection on the smart cards that voters used to cast their votes and poll workers used to gain administrative access to the systems.

  • A complete disregard for disciplined software change-control and testing processes.

  • A questionable choice in the decision to use the programming language C++. Most experts agree that it's easier for inexperienced programmers to introduce glitches and security holes using C++ than it would be if they were using other languages, such as Java.

Although denounced as inaccurate and unrealistic by Diebold and IT industry lobbying groups that favor the use of electronic voting systems, the Johns Hopkins study was followed by two other independent studies, by Science Applications International Corp. and RABA Technologies LLC, that confirmed many of Rubin's findings and uncovered additional concerns.
In fact, the January 2004 study by the RABA Innovative Solutions Cell outlined how researchers were able to guess the passwords for the smart cards used by poll supervisors, allowing them to reinitialize voter cards and vote multiple times.
The team also exploited a 6-month-old unpatched vulnerability in the Microsoft Corp. software used on the back-end Dell Inc. server, that allowed them to upload, download or execute code on the back-end vote tabulation server. That server used an unencrypted modem connection to report local poll results at the end of an election.
RABA also found gaping holes in the procedure by which precincts uploaded votes to their local election boards. As a result of an incomplete implementation of the Secure Sockets Layer protocol, the team was able to conduct a "man in the middle" attack and use a remote laptop to receive the election results. An attacker who did that would "be able to acquire the name and password to access the server," the report concluded. "With this name and password in hand, the attacker could upload modified results to theserver -- all in real time."


Jump to comments

Security

Additional Resources

WHITE PAPER
Approximately 60 percent of data migration projects overrun time or budget, while some fail completely. Download this white paper, "Enhancing Your Chance for Successful Data Migration," to learn the critical steps you need to take to execute a data migration project with minimum cost and risk to your business.
WHITE PAPER
Read the Gartner research note to learn why the TCO of a server-based computing deployment used to deliver all applications to users is around 50% lower than that of an unmanaged desktop deployment.
WHITE PAPER
Economic downturns have a tendency to accelerate emerging technologies, boost the adoption of effective solutions, and punish solutions that are not cost competitive or that are out of synch with industry trends. This IDC White Paper presents the results of an IDC survey of 330 companies in Western Europe, Asia/Pacific and the Americas that measures the receptiveness to Linux and takes into consideration changing views driven by the disruptive economic environment that businesses face today.

White Papers & Webcasts

Share our Strength
Download Now  

Managing Secure File Transfer to Save Time, Money and IT Resources
Learn how companies are using innovative technology to overcome these challenges and improve user productivity by offloading e-mail attachments and replacing FTP with...

Security Convergence Equals Network Security Cost Savings
Listen to IBM Internet Security Systems' take on network security convergence.

Disaster Recovery 2008: Reduced Costs and Improved Performance
How long can your Enterprise afford to be without your data? With an accelerated disaster recovery program, you never have to answer this...