Text 13513, 81 rader
Skriven 2006-10-26 17:19:38 av /m (1:379/45)
Ärende: How to steal an election by hacking the vote
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From: /m <mike@barkto.com>


http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/evoting.ars

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One bad apple...

What if I told you that it would take only one person—one highly motivated, but
only moderately skilled bad apple, with either authorized or unauthorized
access to the right company's internal computer network—to steal a statewide
election? You might think I was crazy, or alarmist, or just talking about
something that's only a remote, highly theoretical possibility. You also
probably would think I was being really over-the-top if I told you that,
without sweeping and very costly changes to the American electoral process,
this scenario is almost certain to play out at some point in the future in some
county or state in America, and that after it happens not only will we not have
a clue as to what has taken place, but if we do get suspicious there will be no
way to prove anything. You certainly wouldn't want to believe me, and I don't
blame you.

So what if I told you that one highly motivated and moderately skilled bad
apple could cause hundreds of millions of dollars in damage to America's
private sector by unleashing a Windows virus from the safety of his parents'
basement, and that many of the victims in the attack would never know that
they'd been compromised? Before the rise of the Internet, this scenario also
might've been considered alarmist folly by most, but now we know that it's all
too real.

Thanks the recent and rapid adoption of direct-recording electronic (DRE)
voting machines in states and counties across America, the two scenarios that I
just outlined have now become siblings (perhaps even fraternal twins) in the
same large, unhappy family of information security (infosec) challenges. Our
national election infrastructure is now largely an information technology
infrastructure, so the problem of keeping our elections free of vote fraud is
now an information security problem. If you've been keeping track of the news
in the past few years, with its weekly litany of high-profile breeches in
public- and private-sector networks, then you know how well we're (not) doing
on the infosec front.

Over the course of almost eight years of reporting for Ars Technica, I've
followed the merging of the areas of election security and information
security, a merging that was accelerated much too rapidly in the wake of the
2000 presidential election. In all this time, I've yet to find a good way to
convey to the non-technical public how well and truly screwed up we presently
are, six years after the Florida recount. So now it's time to hit the panic
button: In this article, I'm going to show you how to steal an election.

Now, I won't be giving you the kind of "push this, pull here" instructions for
cracking specific machines that you can find scattered all over the Internet,
in alarmingly lengthy PDF reports that detail vulnerability after vulnerability
and exploit after exploit. (See the bibliography at the end of this article for
that kind of information.) And I certainly won't be linking to any of the
leaked Diebold source code, which is available in various corners of the online
world. What I'll show you instead is a road map to the brave new world of
electronic election manipulation, with just enough nuts-and-bolts detail to
help you understand why things work the way they do.

Along the way, I'll also show you just how many different hands touch these
electronic voting machines before and after a vote is cast, and I'll lay out
just how vulnerable a DRE-based elections system is to what e-voting
researchers have dubbed "wholesale fraud," i.e., the ability of an individual
or a very small group to steal an entire election by making subtle changes in
the right places.

So let's get right down to business and meet the tools that we're going to use
to flip a race in favor of our preferred candidate.

Note: I'm not in any way encouraging anyone to actually go out and steal an
election. This article is intended solely as a guide to the kinds of
information and techniques that election thieves already have available, and
not as an incitement to or an aid for committing crimes....
===


See the full article for the interesting stuff...

 /m

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