Diebold Security Foiled Again

XenoPhage writes "Yet again, Diebold has shown their security prowess. This time they posted, on their website, a picture of the actual key used to open all of their Diebold voting machines. Ross Kinard of Sploitcast crafted three keys based on this photo. Amazingly enough, two of the three keys successfully opened one of the voting machines. But fear not, Diebold has removed the offending picture, replacing it with a picture of their digital card key. Take that, hackers!"

Comments

National Election Commision

[ghoul]

The way to get rid of election controversies is to have a national election commission like in India. India has a lot more voters than the US and a much lower level of education but it manages to pull off general elections a lot more cleanly and fairly just because the standards are same for all elections and all precincts. The decentralized form of elections might have made sense for the age of horse coaches but in the age of internet it is not too tough to have thge same standards everywhere in the US

Also why not have a paper trail .With a paper backup all fraud can be caught given enough time for recounts (again if elections are not controlled by local partisan officials they cant arbitrarily decide not to have recounts).

Re:National Election Commision

[Midnight Thunder]

Also why not have a paper trail .With a paper backup all fraud can be caught given enough time for recounts (again if elections are not controlled by local partisan officials they cant arbitrarily decide not to have recounts).

In many ways Diebold et al. are all showing symptoms of not realising that they are trying to add technology to the wrong part of the process. In many ways the punch card system or optical card reader systems are the better systems, since the paper trail exists before the vote is taken into account: WYSIWYG. The proposed solutions provide a paper trail as a result of the process, if at all. The problem with this is that the paper trail may not be a result of what you inputted.

Remember just because technology can be used for a process, it does not necessarily mean that technology is needed for the process. Technology is there to make a complex task simple, not the other way round.

Re:Still in business

[aquabat]

Two words: Government Contracts.

This is a security company?

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

Do they even have any security-minded people working at this company? Publishing a picture of a real key is an understandable mistake, but why does the same key open every single voting machine?

Re:the only thing..

[truthsearch]

Funny how you only seem to be responding to the average media coverage and not the facts. Was no one interested or was the media (even non-mainstream) not interested? Plenty of investigations occurred. You apparently just didn't hear about them.

Re:Still in business

[pilgrim23]

In the early 20th century, most cities had Trolly Lines. Most were electric. there was no need for road crowding, smoke billowing Buses. But Detroit realized building buses was a gold mine as long as City planning departments, the Mayor's urban task force and other such public servants could be persuaded to rip up the trolly lines. Thus our public leaders made decisions for the good of us all. The more it changes, the more it stays the same....

Re:Still in business

[jc42]

The people who are making those decisions continue to want to have the voting machines due to all of the evidence showing how unsecure/not-tamper-proof these things really are.

There; fixed it for you.

If you think the politicos making the purchase decisions are ignorant of the documented problems, you're incredibly naive.