Hacker Friendly

Just when you thought you’d heard it all. Diebold (the embattled manufacturer of insecure proprietary electronic voting machines) has apparently done it again.

It was revealed in the course of last summer’s landmark virus hack of a Diebold touch-screen voting system at Princeton University that, incredibly, the company uses the same key to open every machine. …[and Diebold] has had a photograph of the stupid key sitting on their own website’s online store!

Of course, if you have a good photo of a key, you can make a pretty good attempt at copying the key. Security researchers at Princeton did just that: they were able to open a Diebold machine with keys made by filing down a common cabinet key to match the photograph. Diebold has taken the proactive step of closing the barn door after the ship has sailed by removing the photo from their website. No word yet on a recall and reissue of every lock and key for every single one of the compromised units in the field.

I personally don’t trust a voting machine that leaves no paper trail (and therefore no possible way to audit the results). Fortunately, Washington State allows any registered voter to vote via absentee ballot in every election. To me, this is the best possible way to vote: I can vote as early as 90 days before the election, in the comfort of my own home, with plenty of time to research who and what I’m voting on, without the need to stand in line at the polls. The absentee ballot provides a paper trail and acts as a fraud deterrent (intercepting thousands of ballots in the mail seems to me to be much more difficult than hacking a Diebold machine.) Next election, Just Say No to e-voting!

Link (with video and screenshots)