Diebold and Stealing the Vote: The Hack Saga Continues

Imagine if all it took to get inside widely-used Diebold electronic voting machines--perhaps with malicious intentions, such as installing tally-altering software on its memory card--was a photograph of the key to the system's physical lock.

Thanks to a little help from the e-voting outfit itself, it may actually be that simple, a security researcher from Princeton University suggested this week.

According to J. Alex Halderman, a computer science PhD student, a picture of the key published at Diebold's online store was a veritable blueprint for filing down ordinary hardware-store cabinet keys to an identical shape.

Ross Kinard of the site SploitCast, which calls itself "the podcast for hackers, geeks, and the security paranoid," alerted Halderman to the vulnerability. Kinard recently mailed three of his homemade keys to Halderman, who then successfully used them to unlock a Diebold AccuVote-TS machine.