Clandestine, but "properly registered, " voters could enter polling places normally, accept their legitimate ballot smart-card from a poll worker, go to a voting machine and simply insert their own "specially pre-prepared " smart-card into the voting machine rather than the legitimate ballot smart-card. When finished, the clandestine voter would return the legitimate ballot smart-card to a poll worked and exit the polling place.
A clandestine voter could insert a smart-card specially prepared with something as simple as a common Windows virus that would "crash " the voting machine. Poll workers typically are not trained to reset machines back into election mode so "crashed " voting machines would be closed until a technician could be summoned to "fix " the problem.
Such an attack, if mounted by multiple people, could temporarily shut down or slow voting at one or more polling places. For polling places in an area considered to favor one candidate over another, the attack could benefit the opposing candidate by deterring a large number of potential voters from voting.
Even more troubling - specially prepared smart-cards could possibly implement a programmed interface that delivers software code into the voting machine to change votes or other functions. Specially programmed smart-cards used by clandestine voters could, for example, change vote counts on voting machines. Simple software code that subtracts votes from one candidate and adds those votes to another candidate yields the same total vote count. This leaves no evidence or red flag to even suspect this simple vote data change occurred because total votes recorded in memory matches the total number of voters who entered the polling place.
A few voters at a few key polling stations near the end of the Election Day could carry out this type of smart-card attack. There would be nothing out of the ordinary to raise anyone 's concern that an election had been stolen. Malicious program code possibly could even be propagated to the central tabulation machine as it reads a voting machine flash memory cards infected via the same technique.
It is the simplest and most innocent-looking security breach that is often the most successful. Voting fraud using the smart-card, I think, qualifies as both simple and easy with a little advanced planning and preparation.
Any malicious-mind person could envisage this vote fraud scenario during a legitimate voting experience with this voting system. Anyone with a little technical savvy and understanding of Microsoft Windows could likely, in an afternoon, google all the information necessary to plan this type of attack. Smart-card blanks and smart-card read/write devices can be ordered over the Internet in a couple of days.
All the best chain-of-custody procedures, voting machine guards and security seals will not stop smart-card vote fraud hacks. Want more proof? Avi Rubin discusses various smart-card vote fraud hacks in greater in his security analysis ( http://avirubin.com/vote.pdf ) report.
Diebold can make this front-door security issue much less onerous by simply adding a data encryption and password protocol to the smart-cards and the voting machine software that reads and writes the smart-card data it has none today!.
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