Stealing an American election can take less than eight minutes, at least that’s the conclusion of Princeton professor, Andrew Appel and graduate student, Alex Halderman. According to him, it would be child’s play for the Russians, or pretty much anyone, to completely change the results of our November election and the entire experiment cost just $82.
Appel was able to purchase an electronic voting machine online. It was called Sequoia AVC Advantage and despite the fact that it’s an outdated behemoth, it’s still used in four states, including the swing states of Virginia and Pennsylvania.
Clutching a screwdriver, he deftly wedged out the four ROM chips—
they weren’t soldered into the circuit board, as sense might dictate—making it simple to replace them with one of his own: A version of modified firmware that could throw off the machine’s results, subtly altering the tally of votes, never to betray a hint to the voter. The attack was concluded in minutes.
Source: Politico
Proving the vulnerability of our elections has been a passion of Appel’s since 2002, after George Bush was selected by the Supreme Court following a contested race, with accusations of vote tampering, between Bush and Al Gore.
After last month’s hacking of the Democratic National Committee, allegedly by the Russians, a lot of Americans are concerned that the same thing can be done to our elections.
This week, the notion has been transformed from an implausible plotline in a Philip K. Dick novel into a deadly serious threat, outlined in detail by a raft of government security officials. “This isn’t a crazy hypothetical anymore,” says Dan Wallach, one of the Felten-Appel alums and now a computer science professor at Rice. “Once you bring nation states’ cyber activity into the game?” He snorts with pity. “These machines, they barely work in a friendly environment.”
One of the problems with our electoral process is that even so-called national elections, like presidential elections, are run by the states and sometimes even by counties. All in all, there are over 8,000 voting jurisdictions, mostly run by volunteers. There are no requirements, only suggestions, that those jurisdictions follow certain guidelines. The vulnerability of voting machines can be so bad that even our iPhones are more secure.
The Princeton group has a simple message: That the machines that Americans use at the polls are less secure than the iPhones they use to navigate their way there. They’ve seen the skeletons of code inside electronic voting’s digital closet, and they’ve mastered the equipment’s vulnerabilities perhaps better than anyone (a contention the voting machine companies contest, of course). They insist the elections could be vulnerable at myriad strike points, among them the software that aggregates the precinct vote totals, and the voter registration rolls that are increasingly digitized. But the threat, the cyber experts say, starts with the machines that tally the votes and crucially keep a record of them—or, in some cases, don’t.
Many districts are moving away from voting machines, as they should, but there are still enough districts, even in swing states, that if the election is even a little close, our election could easily be rigged. It’s not just the voting machines that are at risk. Election officials use computers, often with outdated hardware and software, to prepare ballots, prepare electronic files, keep track of voter registrations, etc.
It would be one thing if there was some sort of uniformity – perhaps the federal government could use their cyber security resources to prevent malfeasance – but there isn’t. Local voting districts are not expert in cyber security, but they are put in charge of the validity of their ballots. For many, a high school computer student would be able to offer more security than they currently have.
Appel doesn’t have solutions to offer. That’s far more complicated and likely a debate for years to come, but for this year’s election, things could be quite grim. If it’s even remotely close, the Russians, the Chinese or any number of foreign and domestic agents could be very undemocratically determining the fate of our nation.
http://usuncut.news/2016/08/08/princeton-professor-proves-it-takes-just-seven-minutes-to-hack-our-elections/
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