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:Looks like Diebold has some new competition!

[Ihmhi]

You know, the ATM I use nearly every day is made by Diebold.

It's an awesome little ATM. I'm nowhere near rich or even financially secure, and the ability to be able to withdraw money by an exact dollar amount ($6 for breakfast? I can take out exactly six bucks FUCK YEAH) is very appealing. The machine has been down exactly once in the three years I've been using my bank and there has never been any problems with it (save for the time it ate my card while I took to long counting the money - my fault, not the machine's).

This nice little ATM leads me to believe that the only reason the Diebold election systems were so shitty was because they were deliberately designed that way per request or they didn't use whichever competent people engineered their ATMs.