Electronic Voting Machine Cracker Challenge

An anonymous reader writes "In the ongoing debate on the security of electronic voting, an Atlanta area programmer has confronted Georgia election officials on the potential for fraud in its statewide electronic voting system. She claims that she can be prepared to crack the system within a week, and officials have accepted the challenge." What makes this even more interesting is that the election officials are encouraging the woman, so that any possible exploit can be found and remedied.

Comments

This is VERY true

[WilliamsDA]

The Diebold system does have major flaws. I was just at the Crypto2003 conference where one of the talks was on the faults in this system. Amongst other things, when they pointed out the major errors in code, the company replied back calling DES (or DSA, I forget) a compression scheme, and they implemented an algorithm from Handbook of Applied Crypto for purposes of encryption with a value listed in the book that says explicitly "Do not use this for cryptographic purposes"

Re:This is VERY true

[cpeikert]

and they implemented an algorithm from Handbook of Applied Crypto for purposes of encryption with a value listed in the book that says explicitly "Do not use this for cryptographic purposes"

It was actually worse than this -- they used a Linear Congruential Generator, which is a very cheap method of generating "random" numbers. Those numbers might work well for simulations, but for cryptography they're totally predictable once you've seen just a couple of output values. Cryptography relies upon the unpredictability of random numbers for security, so LCGs should never be used for that purpose.