Theatre in Germany

Abstract

With significant U.S. federal funds now available to replace outdated punch-card and mechanical

voting systems, municipalities and states throughout the U.S. are adopting paperless electronic voting

systems from a number of different vendors. We present a security analysis of the source code to one such

machine used in a significant share of the market. Our analysis shows that this voting system is far below

even the most minimal security standards applicable in other contexts. We identify several problems

including unauthorized privilege escalation, incorrect use of cryptography, vulnerabilities to network

threats, and poor software development processes. We show that voters, without any insider privileges,

can cast unlimited votes without being detected by any mechanisms within the voting terminal software.

Furthermore, we show that even the most serious of our outsider attacks could have been discovered

and executed without access to the source code. In the face of such attacks, the usual worries about

insider