BBV--Election boxes easy to mess with- In Annapolis, tales of trickery,

[Champion Jack]

http://www.sunspot.net/news/local/bal-te.md.machine30jan30,0,4050694.story?coll=bal-local-headlines

In Annapolis, tales of trickery, vote rigging

For a week, the computer whizzes laid abuse - both high- and low-tech - on the six new briefcase-sized electronic voting machines sent over by the state.

One guy picked the locks protecting the internal printers and memory cards. Another figured out how to vote more than once - and get away with it. Still another launched a dial-up attack, using his modem to slither through an electronic hole in the State Board of Elections software. Once inside, he could easily change vote totals that come in on Election Day.

"My guess is we've only scratched the surface," said Michael A. Wertheimer, who spent 21 years as a cryptologic mathematician at the National Security Agency.

He is now a director at RABA Technologies in Columbia, the firm that the state hired for about $75,000 to look at Maryland's new touch-screen voting machines scheduled to be unveiled in nearly every precinct in Maryland for the March 2 primary.

The state has no choice but to use its $55 million worth of AccuVote-TS machines made by Diebold Election Systems for the primary. The old optical scanners are gone.
(more)

[ParanoidPat]

1. The state will have no choice but to print paper ballots......

.....and count them by hand if our court system is worth a damn anymore! :evilgrin:

The "optical scanners" aren't worth a damn since the results are tabulated using the same 'GEMS' software as the DRE's. (Direct Recording Electronic voting systems)

[punpirate]

3. Umm... sort of....

The optical scanners still have the paper record which was used to create the electronic record. I suppose the questions are, with optical scanners, matters of whether the paper records are paramount, and of custody of the paper ballots, and whether hand examination of the ballots is, according to the particular state law, of higher value than the electronic registry in any recount.

You're right that there's a problem with the tallying software (in the case of Diebold's GEMS), but recount rules will inevitably apply.

Cheers.

[SaddenedDem]

2. A high school kid could do this....maybe 8th grade.

Meanwhile, William A. Arbaugh, an assistant computer science professor at the University of Maryland, College Park and part of the team, easily sneaked his way into the state's computers by way of his modem. Once in, he had access to change votes from actual precincts - because he knew how to exploit holes in the Microsoft software.

Those holes should have been patched through regular updates sent to customers, patches that haven't been installed on the elections equipment since November.

"There's no security that's going to be 100 percent effective. But the level of effort was pretty low," Arbaugh said. "A high school kid could do this. Right now, the bar is maybe 8th grade. You want to raise the bar to a well-funded adversary."

(from the same link)