Reply #24: Black Box Voting, working with another expert, has some answers [View All]

[bailey77]

There is an additional level of authentication beyond what was originally reported by Black Box Voting last November.

Black Box Voting has reported new information to the House Judiciary committee, and to other congresspersons including Conyers' office, Cynthia McKinney's office, and Corrine Brown's office. So far, no followup by any congressperson has been done on any of the new reports from BBV, which provide information learned in February specific to the hacking (this time, not editing like Harris showed Howard Dean, but actual hacking of the votes). This was done on live Diebold systems in real locations, set up exactly as they were during the 2004 election.

The additional level of authentication is a handshake needed in order to simulate votes going into the GEMS program. It also appears to be easily crackable, and further experimentation will provide the specifics. BBV has also recently experimented, with permission of the proper officials, on other remote access configurations. There is more than one way in, but some of the original concepts, published by Black Box Voting last fall, did not work due to layers of security that were not publicly known at the time.

What happened in King County Washington during the primary, where the GEMS audit log was erased, showed evidence immediately before the erasure which exactly matches the sequence of events needed to hack the system through telephone lines.

Harris met with Donna Frye, the mayoral candidate in San Diego who won with 165,000 write-in votes, but whose election was then taken from her on a technicality. Harris asked Frye to see if she can set up a videotaped demo of hacking the San Diego GEMS system. It will be interesting to see what happens there.

Black Box Voting recently met with researcher Jeremiah Akin, who demonstrated that the audit logs in Sequoia tabulators are even easier to delete than Diebold's. The vote-shaving mentioned above was apparent in poll tapes from New Mexico, and could be enabled easily with local access or with a patch from Sequoia, simply by adjusting the stored business logic in WinEDS.