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

Re:Secure e-voting

[MichaelSmith]

Or even poker machines. Every machine runs from a PROM. Authorities keep a table of validated PROM image checksums. Operators of the machines have to let inspectors validate the checksums on demand, and if it doesn't match then your gaming license gets revoked and the place closes down.

Now thats no too hard, is it? Validate a small number of images, then make damn sure they don't get changed. Encourage simple, embedded systems as opposed to big operating systems with 30 million lines of code.