Monday, February 19, 2007

Princeton Professor Buys Voting Machines (and Starts Reverse-Engineering them) for $82

Andrew Appel, a computer science professor at Princeton, recently purchased 5 Sequoia electronic voting machines and has begun to reverse-engineer them with his students in an attempt to find any security flaws.

Well, they've already found one. According to Appel, the ROM chips of the machines can be removed and replaced in about 10 minutes. Obviously this raises the concern that they could be replaced with chips that would misreport votes.

Hopefully he isn't charged with violating the DCMA for reverse engineering! But, then again, maybe a Princeton professor wouldn't be such a bad client...

See the Wired article for much more information.

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