----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Barry Wellman" <wellman@chass.utoronto.ca>
To: "Lloyd Levine" <levine4assembly@hotmail.com>; <Lloyd.Levine@asm.ca.gov>
Cc: "larry levine" <larrylevine@earthlink.net>; "beverly wellman"
<bevwell@chass.utoronto.ca>
Sent: Thursday, December 22, 2005 6:05 AM
Subject: diebold, etc hacks


got 'em by the scrotum now!

 Barry
 _____________________________________________________________________

  Barry Wellman         Professor of Sociology        NetLab Director
  wellman at chass.utoronto.ca  http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman

  Centre for Urban & Community Studies          University of Toronto
  455 Spadina Avenue    Toronto Canada M5S 2G8    fax:+1-416-978-7162
     To network is to live; to live is to network
 _____________________________________________________________________
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Diebold Hack Hints at Wider Flaws


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By Kim Zetter Kim Zetter | Also by this reporter
2005-12-21 08:35:00.0

Election officials spooked by tampering in a test last week of Diebold
optical-scan voting machines should be equally wary of optical-scan
equipment produced by other manufacturers, according to a computer
scientist who conducted the test.

Election officials in Florida's Leon County, where the test occurred,
promptly announced plans to drop Diebold machines in favor of optical-scan
machines made by Election Systems & Software, or ES&S. But Hugh Thompson,
an adjunct computer science professor at the Florida Institute of
Technology who helped devise last week's test, believes other systems
could also be vulnerable.

"Looking at these systems doesn't send off signals that ... if we just get
rid of Diebold and go to another vendor we'll be safe," Thompson said. "We
know the Diebold machines are vulnerable. As for ES&S, we don't know that
they're bad but we don't know that they're (good) either."

Thompson and Harri Hursti, a Finnish computer scientist, were able to
change votes on the Diebold machine without leaving a trace. Hursti
conducted the same test for the California secretary of state's office
Tuesday. The office did not return several calls for comment.

Information about the vulnerability comes as states face deadlines to
qualify for federal funding to replace punch-card and lever machines with
new touch-screen or optical-scan machines. In order to get funding, states
must have new machines in place by their first federal election after Jan.
1, 2006.

Optical-scan machines have become the preferred choice of many election
officials due to the controversy over touch-screen voting machines, many
of which do not produce a paper trail. Optical-scan machines use a paper
ballot on which voters mark selections with a pen before officials scan
them into a machine. The paper serves as a backup if the machine fails or
officials need to recount votes.

The hack Thompson and Hursti performed involves a memory card that's
inserted in the Diebold machines to record votes as officials scan
ballots. According to Thompson, data on the cards isn't encrypted or
secured with passwords. Anyone with programming skills and access to the
cards -- such as a county elections technical administrator, a savvy poll
worker or a voting company employee -- can alter the data using a laptop
and card reader.

To test the machines, Thompson and Hursti conducted a mock election on
systems loaded with a rigged memory card. The election consisted of eight
ballots asking voters to decide, yes or no, if the Diebold optical-scan
machine could be hacked.

Six people voted "no" and two voted "yes." But after scanning the ballots,
the total showed one "no" vote and seven "yes" votes.

Diebold did not return several calls for comment.

Thompson said in a real race between candidates someone could pre-load 50
votes for Candidate A and minus 50 votes for Candidate B, for example.
Candidate B would need to receive 100 votes before equaling Candidate A's
level at the start of the race. The total number of votes on the machine
would equal the number of voters, so election officials wouldn't become
suspicious.

"It's self-destroying evidence," he said. "Once ... the machine gets past
zero and starts counting forward for Candidate B, there's no record that
at one point there were negative votes for Candidate B."

Thompson said a second vulnerability in the cards makes it easy to program
the voting machine so that it thinks the card is blank at the start of the
race. This is important because before voting begins on Election Day, poll
workers print a report of vote totals from each machine to show voters
that the machines contain no votes.

"The logic to print that zero report is contained on the memory card
itself," Thompson said. "So all you do is alter that code ... to always
print out a zero report (in the morning)."

David Jefferson, a computer scientist at Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory and chair of California's Voting Systems Technical Assessment
and Advisory Board, said that programming software on a removable memory
card raises grave concerns.

"The instant anyone with security sensibility hears this, red flags and
clanging alarms happen," Jefferson said. "Because this software that is
inserted from the memory module is not part of the code base that goes
through the qualification process, so it's code that escapes federal
scrutiny."

The vote manipulation could conceivably be caught in states where election
laws require officials to conduct a 1 percent manual recount to compare
digital votes against paper ballots. Parallel monitoring, in which
officials pull out random machines for testing on Election Day, might also
catch vote manipulation.

But Thompson says machines could be programmed to recognize when they're
being tested so as not to change votes during that time. And a manual
recount that only examines 1 percent of machines might not be broad
enough.

"The question is, if you have altered a memory card in just one of the
polling places or even just on one machine, what are the chances that the
machine would fall under that 1 percent?" Thompson said. "That's kind of
scary."

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