Another voting machine hack courtesy of ArsTechnica. The researchers were able to hack a Sequoia AVC Advantage voting machine by a sneaky buffer overflow attack:
The AVC Advantage has several characteristics that make it more secure than many other voting machines. It has hardware mechanisms that prevent it from running code from RAM. This effectively protects against attacks that involve arbitrary code injection. To circumvent this security measure, the researchers used a technique called return-oriented programming that involves co-opting bits of code that are already in the system.
By chaining together small snippets of regular code from the system ROM, it becomes possible to perform more sophisticated and specialized operations—such as redirecting votes—without having to inject malicious code. …
The cost of this effort, is scary low:
The researchers were able to devise and implement this hack in roughly 16 man-months of labor without having any access to the actual source code or non-public documentation. It worked flawlessly on actual devices during tests and could be used by a sufficiently motivated individual to manipulate the outcome of a real election. The team estimates that a comparable hack could be funded in the private market for as little as $100,000.
This is amazing research with a scary result. Sequoia is obviously trying to do the right thing by restricting execution to ROM. However, it appears that this is not even close to enough for two reasons.
Reason one: attacks only get better. If these voting machines have a shelf life of ten years, then they need to be designed to be resiliant for those ten years.
Reason two: security is an economic proposition. An election is probably worth at least billions of dollars if it could even be monetized. The hack costs only $100,000 which is quite cheap for this kind of exploit.
