$82 Buys E-Voting Secrets

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For a mere $82 a computer scientist and electronic voting criticmanaged to purchase five $5,000 Sequoia electronic voting machines overthe internet last month from a government auction site. And now he'staking them apart.


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

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original story:> Wired News




it would be very interesting if they are indeed able to do this. But i would wonder if they would keep what they find secret and report it to the relevant people/agency or would it be released to the general public also?

I may be out of line here, but I think they should report it to the proper authorities first... and if nothing is done to correct the situation, release the findings to the public. Then I bet some sort of action would be taken to fix the problem[s].

He-heh, I think Dubya paid a lot more than that...

:p

Hmmm................ that kit was 10 years old! ............... I've news for you guys...............DOS isn't a secure operating system:rolleyes:

I really don't see any relevance in whether old stuff could be tampered with, more of an issue might be if you could demonstrate that it had been tampered with.

I thought Princeton was supposed to be a respectable college with high standards?

This dork actually says that "the ease with which his students opened the machines and removed the chips demonstrates that the voting machines are vulnerable to unauthorised modification" what planet does he live on?

Any machine that is not physically secured is vulnerable........... alway was and always will be ;)

They are selling obsolete kit..............did he expect the boxes to be welded shut?

And then we have the "electronic voting critic", so there was obviously no prejudice or hidden agenda?

My take on it is: what is in the past is in the past.......... the real issue is how secure are these things going to be in 2008?