Disaster Waiting to Happen

Via Dan Gillmor comes this report by four computer security professionals on the massive problems with an electronic voting system by Diebold already used in Georgia and just sold to Maryland.

Even with this restricted view of the source code, we discovered significant and wide-reaching security vulnerabilities in the AccuVote-TS voting terminal. Most notably, voters can easily program their own smartcards to simulate the behavior of valid smartcards used in the election. With such homebrew cards, a voter can cast multiple ballots without leaving any trace. A voter can also perform actions that normally require administrative privileges, including viewing partial results and terminating the election early. Similar undesirable modifications could be made by malevolent poll workers (or even maintenance staff) with access to the voting terminals before the start of an election. Furthermore, the protocols used when the voting terminals communicate with their home base, both to fetch election configuration information and to report final election results, do not use cryptographic techniques to authenticate the remote end of the connection nor do they check the integrity of the data in transit. Given that these voting terminals could communicate over insecure phone lines or even wireless Internet connections, even unsophisticated attackers can perform untraceable "man-in-the-middle" attacks.

Not really the kind of thing to inspire voter confidence. Looks like Florida 2000 might have been just a clumsy dress rehearsal.