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

At Least

[dolo666]

This is a change from the Kevin Mitnick days when ppl would be incarcerated for even *thinking* about cracking a gov system.

Mad props to Georgia for being cool about this.

Why electronic voting ?

[Krapangor]

I most European countries people use pen & paper voting.
And unlike the US there was never a Florida voting scam.
And paper is much more immune to fraud: the election sheets are stored for a certain time, so any questions and be sorted out by a recount without any paper pebbles dropping from the holes. And if a fraudelent government wants to pull off a voting scam they have either to forge election sheets, which would be noted afterwards, or they have to destroy sheets, which would be noted, too.

So why use a high-tech solution which isn't immune to fraud and other problems instead of a low-tech solution which hasn't these problems ?

doh

[Anonymous Coward]

God, this is stupid....

Instead of doing such a media hype just open the source code for the public and let about 10'000 people have a look at it.

Idiots.

Re:doh

[Slack3r78]

I'm glad someone else brought this up so I didn't have to. If there was ever an application that needed to be open source, this is it. There's simply too much at stake and too much of a chance for shady manipulation if our voting system was to suddenly become a mystical blackbox where no one really knew what was going on inside.

The only way to disprove any kind of impropriety in an electronic voting system would be to make the internal workings freely viewable to anyone, anywhere. Not only would there be concerned "Citzen Hackers" checking the code, but I'm sure it'd open up a whole field of university level research. And honestly, I'd far rather my tax dollars go to research grants where an open system can be checked and improved than to a private company which may or may not have an agenda that I don't know about.

prove

[Gorny]

Please will at least everyone keep in mind that when she wont succeed in cracking the machine that doesn't prove it's security.

You can't prove a product is secure, only showing that it's insecure...