[Infowarrior] - Academic Paper: Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting Machine

[Richard Forno]

(c/o RK)

 Security Analysis of the Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting Machine
 Ariel J. Feldman, J. Alex Halderman, and Edward W. Felten

 http://itpolicy.princeton.edu/voting/

Abstract:

 This paper presents a fully independent security study of a
 Diebold AccuVote-TS voting machine, including its hardware and
 software. We obtained the machine from a private party. Analysis
 of the machine, in light of real election procedures, shows that
 it is vulnerable to extremely serious attacks. For example, an
 attacker who gets physical access to a machine or its removable
 memory card for as little as one minute could install malicious
 code; malicious code on a machine could steal votes undetectably,
 modifying all records, logs, and counters to be consistent with
 the fraudulent vote count it creates. An attacker could also
 create malicious code that spreads automatically and silently
 from machine to machine during normal election activities --- a
 voting-machine virus. We have constructed working demonstrations
 of these attacks in our lab. Mitigating these threats will
 require changes to the voting machine's hardware and software
 and the adoption of more rigorous election procedures.

---Rsk