The dare was made and accepted at the first of a series of seminars at Kennesaw State sponsored by Secretary of State Cathy Cox to defuse questions about the vulnerability of the statewide system she installed last year.
Jekot said she could be ready as soon as next week. She said all she wants to do is point out weaknesses so that they can be fixed -- and declares she can put an unauthorized vote anywhere she wants.
Election officials promised to provide a voting machine, and a computer server into which votes from the machine are fed.
The November 2002 vote in Georgia went smoothly. But with a federally imposed deadline to revamp the voting systems in all other states now approaching, concern over the corruptibility of computer-based voting has spread across the nation.
Last month, an associate professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University released a study billed as the first independent review of electronic voting. It found the Diebold Election Systems used by Georgia to be vulnerable to tampering by unscrupulous voters, poll workers and software developers.
Election officials in Georgia and other states dismissed it, saying it exaggerated the machines' exposure to hackers.
Furor over the report was partly defused when the lead researcher acknowledged this week that he failed to disclose that he had stock options in VoteHere, a company that competes with Diebold in the voting-software market, and was a member of VoteHere's technical advisory board.
But there remains a bill in Congress, introduced by U.S. Rep. Rush Holt (D-N.J.), to require that all voting machines produce a paper ballot that would be used as a back-up system in all elections. In any dispute, paper ballots would become the final arbiter.
The seminar at KSU was a two-hour argument against the bill. Election officials argued that giving paper ballots the final say in an election would quickly render computer voting useless.
Moreover, they said, paper ballots can be tampered with more easily than electronic ones, and they're harder to tabulate.
Representatives from two U.S. senators and three members of Congress attended the seminar, but most of the questions were posed by Jekot, who describes herself as a political independent, and Hugh Esco, political coordinator of the Green Party of Georgia.
"It's our position that machines are capable of showing whatever machines are programmed to show," Esco said. "I'm not a Luddite. I have a couple computers in the trunk and I know how to use them. But I know that I can't trust them with everything."
Asked Williams, the computer security expert: "Are you saying there's no such thing as a secure and accurate computer? Do you fly on airplanes?"
"Actually, I don't," Esco replied.
Related Sources:
Secret Meetings of the Black Box Yakuza
Voting Fraud-Updates: Scientist Rubin resigned
Update:
Howard Ahmanson-The real "owner" of the Voting Scam
plus more about SAIC and Johns Hopkins
More: Bev Harris at Seattle Times
New SAIC article at Scoop (08/23)
Slashdot responds on Voting Machine Cracker Challenge
Slashdot -Saturday August 23
Williams DA:
"... The Diebold system does have major flaws. I was just at the Crypto2003 conference where one of the talks was on the faults in this system. Amongst other things, when they pointed out the major errors in code, the company replied back calling DES (or DSA, I forget) a compression scheme, and they implemented an algorithm from Handbook of Applied Crypto for purposes of encryption with a value listed in the book that says explicitly "Do not use this for cryptographic purposes"..."
cpeikert:
"...It was actually worse than this -- they used a Linear Congruential Generator, which is a very cheap method of generating "random" numbers. Those numbers might work well for simulations, but for cryptography they're totally predictable once you've seen just a couple of output values. Cryptography relies upon the unpredictability of random numbers for security, so LCGs should never be used for that purpose..."
Phantasmo:
"... She cracks it, reveals the expoit to them, they thank her, put fixing it on a "to do list", then knock her into prison with the mighty DMCA!
I can already hear the local news station:
"Computer hackers are trying to steal your votes! Politicans are asking that if you know ANYONE who both likes computers and is interested in voting that you report them to the police immediately. Film at eleven."
Slack3r78:
"... I'm glad someone else brought this up so I didn't have to. If there was ever an application that needed to be open source, this is it. There's simply too much at stake and too much of a chance for shady manipulation if our voting system was to suddenly become a mystical blackbox where no one really knew what was going on inside.
The only way to disprove any kind of impropriety in an electronic voting system would be to make the internal workings freely viewable to anyone, anywhere. Not only would there be concerned "Citzen Hackers" checking the code, but I'm sure it'd open up a whole field of university level research. And honestly, I'd far rather my tax dollars go to research grants where an open system can be checked and improved than to a private company which may or may not have an agenda that I don't know about..."
Bob Cat - NYMPHS
"...Who is this woman?
She's a webmaster with an interest in carnivorpus plants. She did this site.
http://www.cumbus2002.org/eco_rescue.htm
Note the fucked up links on the bottom of the page. They point to c:.
She does not even have a web site for her web design business! AWEBPLACE.COM is registered to her company Southern Belle Software. Search for some of her posts to newsgroups for more dismaying info.
How about posting the code here, Roxanne? A 'few of your expert friends' will be happy to help you out..."
Lulu of the Lotus-EA
".. I tried posting a story about the EVM2003 project a couple weeks ago, but unfortunately it was rejected. I'll try again soon, I suppose. So this note is a little less complete (not all the background URLs and the like). The project comes out of several years of background work by some well known computer scientists, political scientists, lawyers, elections officials, and political activists. But the demo (to be written in Python, btw), is just starting development.
Anyway, the short story is that I am involved in a project to create an open source voting system, with the extra twist that the machines also produce printed ballots. That is, the electronic part makes selection more clear, and prevent overvotes and other errors, but after using the touchscreen (or mouse, or blind accomodation), voters can visually verify their ballot for accuracy before submitting it to the ballot box...."
Bev Harris
"... No one is saying get rid of touch screens, we are saying PUT PAPER IN THE PRINTER which is already built into Diebold and every other touch screen machine. Print ballot, voter verified, it goes in a ballot box, you've got evidence of the vote. Explain why: 1) A person in a wheelchair, or a muscular or neurological difficulty, who can vote on a touch screen suddenly cannot vote on a touch screen if you have paper in the printer. 2) A person who is blind, and uses the headphones to vote, suddenly cannot vote on a touch screen using headphones if you have paper in the printer. This is a prepared talking point sent out by the voting machine industry. Bev Harris Black Box Voting..."
AP-Report about Roxanne Jekot
News 11/AP -08/23/03
(Atlanta-AP) -- A computer program developer from Cumming has proposed a challenge against the state.
Roxanne Jekot, 51, says she and a few expert friends could crack Georgia's $54 million touch-screen voting system in just minutes.
And, the state says bring it on.
Jekot's challenge came after a two-hour discussion yesterday on whether computers should be the sole tabulators of voter ballots. Secretary of State Cathy Cox has sponsored a series of discussions about the system she installed last year.
Brit Williams is a retired Kennesaw State University professor who helped design the touch-screen security system.
He says he welcomes the dare, but puts the odds of breaking into the software undetected at $1 billion to one.
Jekot says she simply wants to point out the system's weakness so they can be fixed. She contends she will find a way to place and unauthorized voted anywhere she wants.
The challenger says she will be ready to tackle the challenge as soon as next week.
Related links:
Forsyth County woman issues a challenge
Access North Georgia, GA - 13 hours ago
Roxanne Jekot, 51, says she and a few expert friends could crack Georgia's
$54 million touch-screen voting system in just minutes. ...
Cumming Woman Challenges Touch Screen Voting System - WSBtv.com
Computer Whiz Contests Voting System - WXIA-TV
Dare accepted on electronic voting machines
Atlanta Journal Constitution, GA - Aug 22, 2003
Roxanne Jekot, a 51-year-old computer program developer from Cumming, said she and
a few expert friends could crack Georgia's $54 million touch-screen voting ...
