Voting Machine Attacks Proven To Be Practical

An anonymous reader writes "Every time a bunch of academics show vulnerabilities in electronic voting machines, critics complain that the attacks aren't realistic, that attackers won't have access to source code, or design documents, or be able to manipulate the hardware, etc. So this time a bunch of computer scientists from UCSD, Michigan, and Princeton offered a rebuttal. They completely own the AVC Advantage using no access to source code or design documents (PDF), and deliver a complete working attack in a plug-in cartridge that could be used by anyone with a few private minutes with the machine. Moreover, they came up with some cool tricks to do this on a machine protected against traditional code injection attacks (the AVC processor will only execute instructions from ROM). The research was presented at this week's USENIX EVT."

Comments

Re:If they own it, whats the problem?

[Moryath]

The problem is as follows:

- If you are today in Congress/Senate, you are a rich motherfucker who doesn't give a crap about the salary and is in it for either (a) bribes, (b) your own agenda, or (c) both (see also: Obama).

The problem is that in order to get elected, you need SO much money (acquired either legitimately, or like Obama/Clinton through money laundering of foreign donations, such as the millions of $ that came from "Palestine, Wyoming" when his campaign deliberately disabled all normal security features on their website's credit-card system) that no honest person could realistically afford to run.

Further, once they get in, they're in fundraising mode until the next election, or they're in bribe mode as a lame-duck.

The solution - at least partially - would be to prohibit them having ANY access to non-salary money, and set up government funds such that each candidate for a position had a budget of $X to spend in a given campaign - NO MORE and NO LESS.

Take the money out of the system, let the message and policy differences of the candidates decide who gets elected.

But we won't be able to do this - after all, the corrupt politicians we have now got in under the old system. Anything that offers a chance that their corrupt asses won't see (re-)election, is never going to pass.