Taking total control of voting systems: firmware manipulations on an optical scan voting terminal

The firmware of an electronic voting machine is typically treated as a “trusted” component of the system. Consequently, it is misconstrued to be vulnerable only to an insider attack by someone with an in-depth knowledge of the system and access to the source code. This case study focuses on the Diebold/Premier AccuVote Optical Scan voting terminal (AV-OS) that is widely used in the USA elections. We present three low level manipulations of the above voting terminal’s firmware resulting in divergence from its prescribed operation: (i) the first bestows the terminal with a powerful memory card dumping functionality, (ii) the second enables the terminal to leak the ballot details through its serial port thus violating voter privacy during the election, (iii) the final third firmware manipulation is a proof of concept attack that swaps the votes of two candidates thus permanently destroying the election outcome in an undetectable fashion. This demonstrates the extent to which t...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: SAC
• Authors: Seda Davtyan, Sotiris Kentros, Aggelos Kiayias, Laurent D. Michel, Nicolas C. Nicolaou, Alexander Russell, Andrew See, Narasimha Shashidhar, Alexander A. Shvartsman
• Keywords: Electronic Voting, Electronic Voting Machine, SAC 2009, Voting Terminals