Reply #10: (NIST) Panel: E-Voting Vulnerable [View All]

[Wilms]

Panel: E-voting vulnerable

By Anne Broache, CNET News.com

Published on ZDNet News: October 7, 2005, 2:34 PM PT

GAITHERSBURG, Md.--Overlooked bugs and malicious code pose a plausible threat to software on electronic voting machines, a panel of election experts said Friday.

At a conference held by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, part of the U.S. Commerce Department, election officials, computer scientists and academics weighed in on steps that should be taken before, during and after elections to protect the voting systems against software-related problems. Voting has gone increasingly electronic during the past couple of election cycles, but the devices remain without national, uniform security standards.

Keeping electronics systems safe is not just about fending off hackers, members of the panel said.

"All of you running voting systems now are assuredly running software that has bugs in it--presumably in most cases not malicious--but software is buggy," Ron Rivest, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told the audience, composed largely of election officials from various parts of the country.

It's those bugs, the panel suggested, that are probably most likely to blame for irregularities in election outcomes. The problem can be quelled to an extent, the panel said, by insisting on a meticulous, higher-quality approach to software development, by certifying all products, and by openly disclosing the source code used.

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http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-5891237.html