Researchers Demo Hardware Attacks Against India's E-Voting Machines

An anonymous reader writes "India, the world's largest democracy, votes entirely on government-made electronic voting machines that authorities claim are 'tamperproof,' 'infallible,' and 'perfect,' but last week security researchers proved that they can be manipulated to steal elections. A team led by Hari Prasad, Professor J. Alex Halderman, and Rop Gonggrijp released an awesome video that shows off hardware hacks they built. These machines are much simpler than e-voting designs used in the US, but as the research paper explains, this makes attacking the hardware even easier. Halderman's students at the University of Michigan took only about a week to build a replacement display board that lies about the vote totals, and the team also built a pocket-sized device that clips onto the memory chips, with the machine powered on, and rewrites the votes. Clippy says, 'It looks like you're trying to rig an election ...'"

Comments

Security

[Thanshin]

Any security professional, IT or otherwise, who ever says "impossible to break" in any of its forms, should be directly fired.

No discussion. No explanations. You blabber idiocies about your supposed area of expertise, you're fired.

Re:Security

[Anonymous Coward]

I doubt any IT professional would say that. Usually politicians and managers are the ones responsible for this kind of nonsense because they have no clue or just want to sell their product.

Politicians are generally untouchable, no matter what they say or how bad they screw up. And managers make sure the contract contains some fineprint along the lines of "we guarantee nothing" and "not really impossible to break".

So yea, nothing you can do about it.