Tampering with Special Purpose Trusted Computing Devices: A Case Study in Optical Scan E-Voting

Special purpose trusted computing devices are currently being deployed to offer many services for which the general purpose computing paradigm is unsuitable. The nature of the services offered by many of these devices demand high security and reliability, as well as low cost and low power consumption. Electronic Voting machines is a canonical example of this phenomenon. With electronic voting machines currently being used in much of the United States and several other countries, there is a strong need for thorough security evaluation of these devices and the procedures in place for their use. In this work, we first put forth a general framework for special purpose trusted computing devices. We then focus on Optical Scan (OS) electronic voting technology as a specific instance of this framework. OS terminals are a popular e-voting technology with the decided advantage of a user-verified paper trail: the ballot sheets themselves. Still election results are based on machinegenerated t...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: ACSAC
• Authors: Aggelos Kiayias, Laurent Michel, Alexander Russell, Narasimha Shashidhar, Andrew See, Alexander A. Shvartsman, Seda Davtyan
• Keywords: ACSAC 2007, Electronic Voting, Electronic Voting Machines, Security Privacy, Trusted Computing