How to Hack an Election in 7 Minutes. When Princeton professor Andrew Appel decided to hack into a voting machine, he didn’t try to mimic the Russian attackers who hacked into the Democratic National Committee's database last month. He didn’t write malicious code, or linger near a polling place where the machines can go unguarded for days.
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Instead, he bought one online. Story Continued Below. With a few cursory clicks of a mouse, Appel parted with $8. Sequoia AVC Advantage, one of the oldest and vulnerable, electronic voting machines in the United States (among other places it’s deployed in Louisiana, New Jersey, Virginia and Pennsylvania). No sooner did a team of bewildered deliverymen roll the 2.
Appel’s cramped, third- floor office than the professor set to work. He summoned a graduate student named Alex Halderman, who could pick the machine’s lock in seven seconds. Clutching a screwdriver, he deftly wedged out the four ROM chips—they weren’t soldered into the circuit board, as sense might dictate—making it simple to replace them with one of his own: A version of modified firmware that could throw off the machine’s results, subtly altering the tally of votes, never to betray a hint to the voter. The attack was concluded in minutes. To mark the achievement, his student snapped a photo of Appel—oblong features, messy black locks and a salt- and- pepper beard—grinning for the camera, fists still on the circuit board, as if to look directly into the eyes of the American taxpayer: Don’t look at me—you’re the one who paid for this thing. Appel’s mischief might be called an occupational asset: He is part of a diligent corps of so- called cyber- academics—professors who have spent the past decade serving their country by relentlessly hacking it. Electronic voting machines—particularly a design called Direct Recording Electronic, or DRE’s—took off in 2.
Bush v. For the ensuing 1. Appel and his colleagues have deployed every manner of stunt to convince the public that the system is pervasively unsecure and vulnerable. Beginning in the late '9. Appel and his colleague, Ed Felten, a pioneer in computer engineering now serving in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, marshaled their Princeton students together at the Center for Information Technology Policy (where Felten is still director).
There, they relentlessly hacked one voting machine after another, transforming the center into a kind of Hall of Fame for tech mediocrity: reprogramming one popular machine to play Pac- Man; infecting popular models with self- duplicating malware; discovering keys to voting machine locks that could be ordered on e. Bay. Eventually, the work of the professors and Ph. D. The DNC hack, in a way, has compelled the public to ask the precise question the Princeton group hoped they’d have asked earlier, back when they were turning voting machines into arcade games: If motivated programmers could pull a stunt like this, couldn't they tinker with the results in November through the machines we use to vote? This week, the notion has been transformed from an implausible plotline in a Philip K. Dick novel into a deadly serious threat, outlined in detail by a raft of government security officials. Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson recently conceded the “longer- term investments we need to make in the cybersecurity of our election process.” A statement by 3. Aspen Institute issued a public statement: “Our electoral process could be a target for reckless foreign governments and terrorist groups.” Declared Wired: “America’s Electronic Voting Machines Are Scarily Easy Targets.”For the Princeton group, it’s precisely the alarm it has been trying to sound for most of the new millennium.
It’s a process regulated state by state. Technical standards for voting are devised by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the Election Assistance Commission—which was formed after the disputed 2. Policy on voting is decided by each state and, in some cases, each county—a system illustrated vividly by the trench warfare of voter ID laws that pockmark the country. In total, more than 8,0. Some would say such a system cries out for security standards. If such standards come to fruition, it will be the Princeton group—the young Ph.
D.’s who have since moved on to appointments and professorships around the country—and their contemporaries in the computer science world who suddenly matter. The Princeton group has a simple message: That the machines that Americans use at the polls are less secure than the i. Phones they use to navigate their way there. They’ve seen the skeletons of code inside electronic voting’s digital closet, and they’ve mastered the equipment’s vulnerabilities perhaps better than anyone (a contention the voting machine companies contest, of course). They insist the elections could be vulnerable at myriad strike points, among them the software that aggregates the precinct vote totals, and the voter registration rolls that are increasingly digitized.
Ivan Laliashvili is a concept artist from Russia who currently works for Netease. Tomorrow is Lipstick Day and M.A.C. You don’t have to buy anything, just show up at one of their U.S. Get the latest science news and technology news, read tech reviews and more at ABC News. Long before ransomware and large-scale hacks became everyday problems, viruses were crawling into our desktops and infecting our screens. These days, smartph.
But the threat, the cyber experts say, starts with the machines that tally the votes and crucially keep a record of them—or, in some cases, don't. Since their peak around 2.
Instead, rushing to install paper backups, sell off the machines and replace them with optical scanners—in some cases, ban them permanently for posterity. But the big picture, like everything in this insular world, is complicated.
As the number of machines dwindle—occasioned by aging equipment, vintage- era software that now lacks tech support, years without new study by the computer scientists, and a public sense that the risk has passed—the opportunities for interference may temporarily spike. Hundreds of digital- only precincts still remain, a significant portion of them in swing states that will decided the presidency in November. And, as the Princeton group warns, they become less secure with each passing year.***In American politics, an onlooker might observe that hacking an election has been less of a threat than a tradition. Ballot stuffing famously plagued statewide and some federal elections well into the 2. Huey Long was famously caught rigging the vote in 1. Sixteen years later, 1.
Lyndon Landslide,” in which Johnson mysteriously overcame a 2. Senate race, a miracle that Robert Caro reports was the almost certain result of vote rigging. But even an unrigged election can go haywire, as the nation learned in horror during the Florida recount in 2. Congress's solution was to pass the Help America Vote Act in 2. All 5. 0 states took the money. Requirements included upgrading voter registration methods and making polls disability- friendly, but Section 1.
By 2. 00. 6, states had spent nearly $2. Section 1. 02 funds. Fight Night Round 3 Controls.
In Pennsylvania, the funds purchased 2. Some, like the Diebold TSX, Advanced WINvote, the ES& S i. Votronic, and a variant of Appel’s AVC Advantage—the Sequoia Edge—would be the same models to come under scrutiny by cybersecurity experts and academics. Thousands of touchscreen DREs were similarly sold in state contracts. Between Election Day 2. HAVA cutoff in 2.
At left, Kiyomi Fukushima tries out an i. Votronic electronic voting machine on display at Leisure World retirement community in September 2. Seal Beach, California. At right, Leota Acton, left, and Esther Chaney, of Carroll Ohio, look at the spool of paper in the new Die.
Bold Accu. Vote- TSX polling station in October 2. Lancaster, Ohio. To state officials—and, at first, voters—the free federal money seemed like a bargain. To computer scientists, it seemed like a disaster waiting to happen. Wallach remembers when he testified before the Houston City Council, urging members not to adopt the machines.
They’re just computers, and we know how to tamper with computers. That’s what we do,'” Wallach recalls. The Very Best Of The Lighthouse Family Downloadable Movies. These machines are great!’ And then they bought them.” Almost from the day they were taken out of the box, the touch- screen machines demonstrated problems (the same companies had a much better track record with Optical Scan machines). During the primaries in Florida in 2. Miami- Dade malfunctioned and failed to turn on, resulting in hourslong lines that locked out untold numbers of voters—including then- gubernatorial candidate Janet Reno. That year, faulty software (and an administrator oversight) on Sequoia models led to a fourth of votes initially omitted during early voting in Albuquerque’s Bernalillo County.
In Fairfax County, Virginia, an investigation into a 2. With margin sizes small enough to be noticed, local elections were vaulted into the forefront of these debates; Appel later found himself issuing expert testimony for a tiny election for the Democratic Executive Committee in Cumberland County, New Jersey, where a candidate lost by 2. The margin was small enough that the losers sued, and called 2. The machine in use was a Sequoia AVC Advantage. Wow, these are a bad idea. They’re just computers, and we know how to tamper with computers.”Cybersecurity researchers flocked to study the machines, but they say they were faced with an uncompromising adversary: the voting machine companies, which viewed the code of the machines as intellectual property.
Until 2. 00. 9, two companies, Diebold and ES& S, controlled the lion’s share of the voting machine market. The accreditation process is equally narrow: Since 1. The laboratories (“Independent Testing Authorities”) which conduct the certification reviews are typically paid by the manufacturers, and are usually required to sign nondisclosure agreements. In 2. 00. 8, five labs were accredited; one was suspended that year for poor lab procedures, and another temporarily suspended for insufficient quality control. State authorities can typically request these lab reports, as Kathy Rogers of ES& S reminded me in an email.