EVMs vulnerable to software attacks

While Indian elections are going the electronic way, computer scientists at the Princeton University in the US have shown that electronic voting machines are extremely vulnerable to election frauds.

They have demonstrated this by creating "vote-stealing" software that can be installed within a minute on a common electronic voting machine.

"The software can fraudulently change vote counts without being detected," according to their paper appearing on the website of the university's Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP).

According to the CITP director Edward Felten, who co-authored the paper with two graduate students, the software was created "to guide public officials so that they can make wise decisions about how to secure elections".

The researchers, who developed the software for demonstration in one brand of voting machine, say that, "there is reason for concern about other machines as well".

A 10-minute video on the website shows the software sabotaging a mock presidential election where one candidate is reported as the winner even though the other gets more votes.

The researchers also demonstrate how the machines "are susceptible to computer viruses that can spread themselves automatically and invisibly from machine to machine during normal pre- and post-election activity".

"Some of the problems discussed in the paper cannot be fixed without completely redesigning the machine," according to the researchers.

IANS