The Vulnerability Assessment Team at Argonne National Laboratory looks at a wide variety of security devices– locks, seals, tags, access control, biometrics, cargo security, nuclear safeguards–to try to find vulnerabilities and locate potential fixes. Unfortunately, there’s not much funding available in this country to study election security. So we did this as a Saturday afternoon type of project. It’s called a man-in-the-middle attack. It’s a classic attack on security devices. You implant a microprocessor or some other electronic device into the voting machine, and that lets you control the voting and turn cheating on and off. We’re basically interfering with transmitting the voter’s intent. We used a logic analyzer. Digital communication is a series of zeros and ones. The voltage goes higher, the voltage goes lower. A logic analyzer collects the oscillating voltages between high and low and then will display for you the digital data in a variety of formats. But there all kinds of way to do it. You can use a logic analyzer, you can use a microprocessor, you can use a computer–basically, anything that lets you see the information that’s being exchanged and then lets you know what to do to mimic the information.
I’ve been to high school science fairs where the kids had more sophisticated microprocessor projects.So we listened to the communications going on between the voter, who in the case of one machine is pushing buttons (it’s a push-button voting machine) and in the other is touching things on a touchscreen. Then we listened to the communication going on between the smarts of the machine and the voter. Let’s say I’m trying to make Jones win the election, and you might vote for Smith. Then my microprocessor is going to tell the smarts of the machine to vote for Jones if you try to vote for Smith. But if you’re voting for Jones anyway, I’m not going to tamper with the communications. Sometimes you block communications, sometimes you tamper with information, sometimes you just look at it and let it pass on through. That’s essentially the idea. Figure out the communications going on, then tamper as needed, including with the information being sent back to the voter.
We can do this because most voting machines, as far as I can tell, are not encrypted. It’s just open standard format communication. So it’s pretty easy to figure out information being exchanged. Anyone who does digital electronics–a hobbyist or an electronics fan–could figure this out.
The device we implanted in the touchscreen machine was essentially $10 retail. If you wanted a deluxe version where you can control it remotely from a half a mile away, it’d cost $26 retail. It’s not big bucks. RadioShack would have this stuff. I’ve been to high school science fairs where the kids had more sophisticated microprocessor projects than the ones needed to rig these machines.
Full Article: How I Hacked An Electronic Voting Machine | Popular Science.