AVC Advantage Attack

Questions about the trustworthiness of electronic voting machines have been in the news a lot over the last few years. Plenty of people acknowledge the potential for abuse of these machines, and discussions of how they can be used to swing elections are pretty common. A trait that these discussions share are hypothetical scenarios or instances where an attacker would need to have some kind of esoteric/insider knowledge about the hardware and/or software running the machine to mount an effective attack.

However, I recently came across a video detailing a real attack against a real voting machine, carried out by real engineers, using real tools and data, and showing very real results.

The Sequoia AVC Advantage, a pretty old piece of electronic voting equipment, was broken pretty badly by hardware reverse engineering and return-oriented programming. The following video shows how it was done by a team of computer scientists and engineers from the University of California, San Diego, the University of Michigan, and Princeton University:

More about the attack details here.

What’s really interesting is the ease in which they were able to get a voting machine to play with in the first place. They didn’t steal one or bribe a government worker. Instead, they bought 5 of them… online… from a government surplus auction for less than $20 a pop. Craziness… especially considering some states still use these same machine models. A few months later and these guys have a well-structured attack that can swing the vote any way they want.

This just goes to show how thin the line is between hypothetical voting machine attacks carried out by insiders with special knowledge and real voting machine attacks carried out by smart people with a couple of dollars and some spare time on their hands.