Next weekend, voters in Australia's New South Wales head to the polls to elect a new government. Some citizens have already cast their votes online. The danger is that the system may have been infected by the Freak bug.
These are reported by Vanessa Teague and J. Alex Halderman, respectively, a research associate in the Department of Computer Science and Information Systems at the University of Melbourne and an assistant professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan and director of the Michigan Center for Computer Security and Society.
The system in question is called the iVote system and was launched in 2011 to help voters who live 20 kilometers or more away from the polling station, or for those who will be abroad or in another state on election day.
According to Teague and Halderman, it is possible to hack the system to alter the results. This happens if the voter uses the voting system to vote from a network that has been hacked.
In their demonstration, a malicious script that has infiltrated the network into iVote can change a citizen's vote. They also showed how an attacker can steal a voter's secret PIN
iVote , although it has received several fixes , is still vulnerable to attacks and tampering, according to the director of the New South Wales intelligence agency . Teague , speaking at the annual Ruxcon security conference in Melbourne last year , said voting systems are not yet ready to be fully trusted.
