Cylance Discloses Voting Machine Vulnerability
blog.cylance.com
Cylance Discloses Voting Machine Vulnerability
1–10 of 127 posts
Re: Cylance Discloses Voting Machine Vulnerability
#2I worked as an election judge in the 2012 general election in Arapahoe County, Colorado. We had these exact machines. What isn't pictured is the physical security performed with them.
Typically, tamper seals that are identifiable as broken are placed on all access doors (including the power switch, data load slots, etc), access panels, and openings on the device. All seals were verified in tact before and after the election, and no voter was ever permitted in the back of the access panel where the firmware update would take place.
Before the machine starts, it gives a "zero" report which is verified independently by poll watchers, and confirms candidate choices are in place as needed. When the polls are closed, we seal everything again before the machines are sent back for reporting (at which point the seals are checked and verified prior to dumping results).
If this was really a damaging hack, the protective counter & live counters would show different numbers than what the machine read, but that didn't happen. It very clearly was tampered with, which means these physical measures would counteract any unwanted firmware updates during an election. It's preposterous to think that election judges aren't actively verifying seals during election day and making sure nobody is tampering with them.
Re: Cylance Discloses Voting Machine Vulnerability
#3I worked as an election judge in the 2012 general election in Arapahoe County, Colorado. We had these exact machines. What isn't pictured is the physical security performed with them. Typically, tamper seals that are identifiable as broken are placed on all access doors (including the power switch, data load slots, etc), access panels, and openings on the device. All seals were verified in tact before and after the e…
But you're assuming that all the officicials dealing with the machines have the same moral standards as you.
It's not necessarily the voters that need to be watched...
Re: Cylance Discloses Voting Machine Vulnerability
#4I worked as an election judge in the 2012 general election in Arapahoe County, Colorado. We had these exact machines. What isn't pictured is the physical security performed with them. Typically, tamper seals that are identifiable as broken are placed on all access doors (including the power switch, data load slots, etc), access panels, and openings on the device. All seals were verified in tact before and after the e…
I'd feel a million times more confident in a simple pen and paper voting system.
Re: Cylance Discloses Voting Machine Vulnerability
#5I worked as an election judge in the 2012 general election in Arapahoe County, Colorado. We had these exact machines. What isn't pictured is the physical security performed with them. Typically, tamper seals that are identifiable as broken are placed on all access doors (including the power switch, data load slots, etc), access panels, and openings on the device. All seals were verified in tact before and after the e…
Exactly. You could tamper with most systems if you had that much physical access, including paper counts. Which is why there are procedures in place to minimize that potential.
Plus an attack like this would be isolated to the single machine (not that it wouldn't be bad, but it wouldn't be applied in a distributed fashion).
Re: Cylance Discloses Voting Machine Vulnerability
#6I worked as an election judge in the 2012 general election in Arapahoe County, Colorado. We had these exact machines. What isn't pictured is the physical security performed with them. Typically, tamper seals that are identifiable as broken are placed on all access doors (including the power switch, data load slots, etc), access panels, and openings on the device. All seals were verified in tact before and after the e…
But you're assuming that all the officicials dealing with the machines have the same moral standards as you. It's not necessarily the voters that need to be watched...
At least in Arapahoe County, everything we did was in pairs of republicans and democrats, to ensure that it was a fair election as far as we could. This included seal checking, logging the zero counts, etc. Everything had a paper audit trail for who interacted with what, who signed off on what, and what was going on.
I don't know how it worked when the machines were picked up for counting, but I assume similar measures were in place.
Edit: Also, poll watchers from both parties could observe our methods. Everyone had a vested interest in verifying that no tampering was taking place, even if that didn't include election workers.
Re: Cylance Discloses Voting Machine Vulnerability
#7I worked as an election judge in the 2012 general election in Arapahoe County, Colorado. We had these exact machines. What isn't pictured is the physical security performed with them. Typically, tamper seals that are identifiable as broken are placed on all access doors (including the power switch, data load slots, etc), access panels, and openings on the device. All seals were verified in tact before and after the e…
But you're assuming that all the officicials dealing with the machines have the same moral standards as you. It's not necessarily the voters that need to be watched...
Officials are more likely to be skilled at hacking paper than electronic devices :)
Re: Cylance Discloses Voting Machine Vulnerability
#8I worked as an election judge in the 2012 general election in Arapahoe County, Colorado. We had these exact machines. What isn't pictured is the physical security performed with them. Typically, tamper seals that are identifiable as broken are placed on all access doors (including the power switch, data load slots, etc), access panels, and openings on the device. All seals were verified in tact before and after the e…
The machines are sent back to a central point, without getting a report at the individual polling stations?
I think I see the problem.
Re: Cylance Discloses Voting Machine Vulnerability
#9Really what it seems is that we need more audits on machines. If democracy is to be a pivotal part of our election process we need to release the source code of these machines to ensure that we find and solve problems.
Re: Cylance Discloses Voting Machine Vulnerability
#10"The decision to announce the research findings was intended to encourage increased sales and revenue for Q4 2016."