![]() This makes it possible to attack the ballot-marking devices at scale, over a wide area, without needing physical access to any of them.” “The most critical problem we found,” Halderman wrote, is a “vulnerability that can be exploited to spread malware from a county’s central election management system to every ballot-marking device in the jurisdiction. Halderman, who has researched digital elections equipment for decades, said court-ordered access to Georgia’s election equipment, manufactured by Dominion, allowed them to do “the first study in more than 10 years to comprehensively and independently assess the security of a widely deployed US voting machine, as well as the first-ever comprehensive security review of a widely deployed ballot marking device”. But an agreement was reached earlier this month to release a redacted version, together with the Mitre report. US district judge Amy Totenberg had sealed the Halderman report since 2021 because of cybersecurity concerns, as part of a lawsuit that started before the most recent presidential election and rise of election deniers. The scenario lands Georgia in a situation where top computer scientists and Trump-aligned election deniers appear to be sharing the same or similar concerns, even while one relies on groundbreaking research, while the other has been discredited by courts and election officials alike. Computer scientists from many of the US’s leading universities signed a letter decrying the standoff, and urging Mitre to retract its report. Raffensperger has made several statements in recent weeks calling the computer scientists’ conclusions “theoretical and imaginary”, and conflating their warnings with “Stop the Steal” efforts post-2020 – leading Halderman to label the state’s officials as “vulnerability deniers”. Halderman called Raffensperger’s decision not to address the system’s vulnerabilities “irresponsible and wrong”. In justifying his decision not to update the state’s voting system, Raffensperger pointed to the Mitre report, which says the potential attacks Halderman identifies are “operationally infeasible”. Mitre did not have the same access to test Georgia’s voting equipment, and claimed the vulnerabilities are unlikely to be exploited on a wide scale. The other was prepared by Mitre, a research and development company, and paid for by Dominion Voting Systems, manufacturer of the state’s electronic voting system. The report, which had been sealed for two years by the court, found “vulnerabilities in nearly every part of the system that is exposed to potential attackers” which could allow votes to be changed, potentially affecting election outcomes in Georgia, according to a summary by Halderman. ![]() One, a 96-page report prepared by J Alex Halderman, and Drew Springall, computer science professors at the University of Michigan and Auburn University, respectively, is based on tests of the equipment used in the increasingly important swing state. The dueling reports were released by a federal court as part of a lawsuit. ![]()
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