Hasta La Gadget!

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has hacked the vote. All for a good cause, of course. A team from the organization took part in DC’s pilot program aimed at testing out Internet voting for those overseas and in the military.

It took the team 36 hours to find and exploit a vulnerability in system. Using the exploit, they were able to change votes and look at secret ballots. The vulnerability is related to the way the system processes ballots. The team was able to gain access privileges to the server application, making it possible to change ballots in the database.

The EFF’s J. Alex Halderman has a pretty in-depth post over at the organization’s blog, detailing the exploit and what such a vulnerability ultimately means for the future of Internet voting.

“The specific vulnerability that we exploited is simple to fix, but it will be vastly more difficult to make the system secure,” Halderman explains, adding that the problems his team discovered are just the tip of the voting security iceberg. “None of this will come as a surprise to Internet security experts, who are familiar with the many kinds of attacks that major Websites suffer from on a daily basis. It may someday be possible to build a secure method for submitting ballots over the Internet, but in the meantime, such systems should be presumed to be vulnerable based on the limitations of today’s security technology.”

Still better than dealing with a hanging chad? Arguably.