How to Hack an Election in One Minute

Princeton U. researchers have released a study and video that demonstrate the ease of altering votes on an electronic voting machine.

On September 13, researchers at Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP) released a study detailing their successful attempt to hack a Diebold AccuVote-TS, one of the most widely used voting machines in the United States. The researchers, Ariel J. Feldman, J. Alex Halderman, and Edward W. Felten, also posted a demonstration video of their hack.

The CITP is not the first group to demonstrate the vulnerability of Diebold’s machines. BlackBoxVoting.org, Open Voting Foundation, and Johns Hopkins computer science professor Avi Rubin have all published accounts of security compromises in Diebold products. BlackBoxVoting.org wrote about their successful guerrilla project to swap out a Diebold voting machine’s memory card using $12 worth of tools in four minutes (the Princeton team says it can execute its hack in one minute).

By Daniel Turner

Full Story: http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=17508&ch=infotech