January 3, 2007 at 08:12:44

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Overview of Major Expert Studies on Voting Systems

By Rady Ananda (about the author)     Page 2 of 7 page(s)

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Report is limited to identifying the least difficult way to alter results on a statewide Basis. It's also limited to studying attacks that cannot be prevented by physical security and accounting measures taken by election officials.

The analysis further assumed that certain fundamental physical security and accounting procedures were already in place.

Concluded that it would take only one person, with a sophisticated technical knowledge and timely access to the software that runs the voting machines, to change the outcome.

All three voting systems have significant security and reliability vulnerabilities, which pose a real danger to the integrity of national, state, and local elections.

The most troubling vulnerabilities of each system can be substantially remedied if proper countermeasures are implemented at the state and local level.

Few jurisdictions have implemented any of the key countermeasures that could make the least difficult attacks against voting systems much more difficult to execute successfully.

For all three types of voting systems:

1. When the goal is to change the outcome of a close statewide election, attacks that involve the insertion of Software Attack Programs or other corrupt software are the least difficult attacks.

2. Voting machines that have wireless components are significantly more vulnerable to a wide array of attacks.

DREs without voter-verified paper trails do not have available to them a powerful countermeasure to software attacks: post-election Automatic
Routine Audits that compare paper records to electronic records.

For DREs w/VVPT and PCOS:

1. The voter-verified paper record, by itself, is of questionable security value. The paper record has significant value only if an Automatic Routine Audit is performed (and a well-designed chain of custody and physical security procedures is followed).

2. Even if jurisdictions routinely conduct audits of voter-verified paper records, DREs w/VVPT and PCOS are vulnerable to certain software attacks or
errors.

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COMPUWARE CORP. DRE Technical Security Assessment Report for Ohio, NOV. 2003. Confidential report prepared for Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, and later published on the web. High risks include:

With access to the supervisor card, someone could guess the four digit PIN. The four digit PIN is a factory default from Diebold and cannot be changed. In our test it was guessed in less than two minutes of testing.

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