Security Analysis of the Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting Machine

The IT Policy Center at Princeton got ahold of a Diebold voting machine and tore into it. They have published the results of their findings, and it ain't pretty, folks. Here is the abstract from the paper:

This paper presents a fully independent security study of a Diebold AccuVote-TS voting machine, including its hardware and software. We obtained the machine from a private party. Analysis of the machine, in light of real election procedures, shows that it is vulnerable to extremely serious attacks. For example, an attacker who gets physical access to a machine or its removable memory card for as little as one minute could install malicious code; malicious code on a machine could steal votes undetectably, modifying all records, logs, and counters to be consistent with the fraudulent vote count it creates. An attacker could also create malicious code that spreads automatically and silently from machine to machine during normal election activities -- a voting-machine virus. We have constructed working demonstrations of these attacks in our lab. Mitigating these threats will require changes to the voting machine's hardware and software and the adoption of more rigorous election procedures.

http://itpolicy.princeton.edu/voting/

If you go to the Princeton IT Policy Voting page, there are links to the whole paper, a summary, FAQs, and a video demo of them throwing a presidential election for Benedict Arnold (over George Washington).

This report is creating a buzz in the computer security field, since it's bonafide CompSec professionionals that have torn this thing apart. Rumor has it that Diebold is unhappy with the report (shocking!) and is going to try to get it off of Princeton's website.