Voting machine security

[Eric Rescorla]

At Fri, 15 Aug 2008 11:57:38 -0400,
John Ioannidis wrote:
> 
> This just about sums it up: http://xkcd.com/463/

Without directly addressing the question of the quality of Diebold's
offerings, I actually don't think the criticism implied here is
entirely fair. If you're going to have voting machines, even precinct
count optical scanners (and because of the complexity of US elections,
hand counting is quite expensive), you likely want to machine
tabulate, and that means an EMS. Though you certainly should make
serious attempts to keep the EMS from coming in contact with outside
data (see [HRS+08] for some discussion of how difficult this actually
is), there is always some chance that there will be some
contact. Generic AV probably isn't that great at detecting or stopping
this, but it may well be better than nothing, and it's certainly an
arguable point.

More discussion at:
http://www.educatedguesswork.org/2008/08/should_voting_systems_have_av.html

-Ekr


[HRS+08] J.A. Halderman, E. Rescorla, H. Shacham, and D. Wagner. ?You
Go to Elections with the Voting System You Have: Stop-Gap Mitigations
for Deployed Voting Systems.? In D. Dill and T. Kohno, eds.,
Proceedings of EVT 2008. USENIX/ACCURATE, July 2008. 
http://www.cse.ucsd.edu/~hovav/papers/hrsw08.html

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