A report published recently showed that the touch-screen voting machines could be vulnerable to hackers inspired by the National Association of Secretaries of State, including a majority of Member States in their elections, whether the standards for machines must be strengthened up to prevent manipulation.
Apparatus vote are not standards on the agenda of the annual session of the association at the end of July in Portland, Maine. But after the study (PDF) of the Johns Hopkins University researchers was released publicly in the discussion group, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, NIST, the government of recruitment standards of the organization, to prepare a White Paper on safety standards for the new generation of machines Informatisés to vote.
No decision was taken, said Kay Albowicz a representative of the State of Washington, DC Group. NIST, a nonregulatory agency, headquartered in Gaithersburg, Maryland, works with industry to develop and apply technology, measurements and standards.
Computer-scientific concern about the security of information systems for voting machines in recent years, but they were unable to gather much support elections, officials remain confident that systems are in principle , To guarantee and handling breakdowns. The study by Johns Hopkins is the first piece of evidence that the current Touch-Screen-technology could seriously harm.
Of course, stressed that further studies are carried out to discover how these vulnerable, “it is a feeling that in the past (critical systems of machines) were part of the Black Box quantity and conspiracy theorist,” said Albowicz. “Nobody says that now.
Aviel Rubin, technical director of the Johns Hopkins Information Security Institute, led a team of three computer researchers to examine the source code of touch screen voting machines Diebold. More than 40000 Diebold voting machines are in use in 37 countries. Most use the touch screen technology, while the rest of the use of optical scanning equipment, said Mike Jacobsen, a spokesman for the company.
The code was downloaded earlier this year from a company FTP site. The page is not public, but he was not sure. Diebold, representatives of the section of the site of the company to remedy voting machines. Diebold has since fired the source code from the Internet. The company employees now disks.