iowa underground blog

 Welcome to another installment of ‘As Our  Banana Republic Turns’. How many years have  we known about Diebold machines and security  vulnerabilities now? How much longer do we  continue to allow Diebold, a private corporation,  such power and control over our election process  while simultaneously maintaining a suspicious   degree of secrecy and giving us no paper trail??

 Story via InsideBayArea.com.

 (You’ll have to forgive abccbsnbccnnmsnbcfox for  continuing to pay short shrift to this fundamental  concern to our democracy. They’re hot on the   trail of the missing white woman’s killer.)

New security glitch found in Diebold system
Officials say machines have ‘dangerous’ holes
By Ian Hoffman, STAFF WRITER

Elections officials in several states are scrambling to understand and limit the risk from a “dangerous” security hole found in Diebold Election Systems Inc.’s ATM-like touch-screen voting machines.

The hole is considered more worrisome than most security problems discovered on modern voting machines, such as weak encryption, easily pickable locks and use of the same, weak password nationwide.

Armed with a little basic knowledge of Diebold voting systems and a standard component available at any computer store, someone with a minute or two of access to a Diebold touch screen could load virtually any software into the machine and disable it, redistribute votes or alter its performance in myriad ways.

“This one is worse than any of the others I’ve seen. It’s more fundamental,” said Douglas Jones, a University of Iowa computer scientist and veteran voting-system examiner for the state of Iowa.

“In the other ones, we’ve been arguing about the security of the locks on the front door,” Jones said. “Now we find that there’s no back door. This is the kind of thing where if the states don’t get out in front of the hackers, there’s a real threat.”

This newspaper is withholding some details of the vulnerability at the request of several elections officials and scientists, partly because exploiting it is so simple and the tools for doing so are widely available.

...

California, Pennsylvania and Iowa are issuing emergency notices to local elections officials, generally telling them to “sequester” their Diebold touch screens and reprogram them with “trusted” software issued by the state capital. Then elections officials are to keep the machines sealed with tamper-resistant tape until Election Day.

...

Scientists said Diebold appeared to have opened the hole by making it as easy as possible to upgrade the software inside its machines. The result, said Iowa’s Jones, is a violation of federal voting system rules.

“All of us who have heard the technical details of this are really shocked. It defies reason that anyone who works with security would tolerate this design,” he said.

BradBlog has much more on this here.
Story originally found on this metafilter thread.
See also: Iowa Voters for Open and Transparent elections
Yet more from The Smirking Chimp

• pdx

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 11th, 2006 at 8:02 am and is filed under Politics, Iowa, Elections. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.