Bridging the Gap between Vulnerabilities and Threats in Electronic Voting

Abstract

Several recent studies have reported substantial vulnerabilities throughout the designs and implementations of current commercially available optical scan and DRE electronic voting system used in the United States. Every system examined by the security research community (from four major vendors) was found to have software flaws and architectural failures that, under some circumstances, could allow an attacker to take control over precinct hardware, alter or fabricate recorded results, or install and virally propagate malicious software and firmware throughout the entire system. These systems suffer from basic cryptographic and key management errors, buffer overflows in modules that accept input from untrusted sources, easily circumvented access controls, backdoor debugging modes, and feature interaction and configuration vulnerabilities. In some cases, systemwide viruses can be introduced by a single individual voter or temporary precinct poll worker.