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

Tampered EVMs may have already been used

[digTro]

There have been allegations in the past that political parties in India have rigged EVMs and I think that is quite likely despite the lack of "evidence". To understand that, you need to know how the voting system works in Indian elections.

The educated elite in India are apathetic to voting. They have no trust in the administrative system and have no hope that the endemic corruption will ever end. So come election time, the people who vote are mostly the poor who hope that some day, the extravagant promises made by the political parties will be kept . Before election day, the voters are bribed with free liquor and food. The women folk are given new clothes. And finally cash is also distributed to bias the voters to chose a particular candidate. The system which issues voter identification cards is broken and sometimes you can find impostors voting on behalf of actual voters.

Given the amount of money that politicians spend on rigging manual voting, tampering EVMs is just good business practice. It is cheaper and you don't need to chase around thousands of voters.