Voting is the process through which a democratic society determines its government. Therefore, voting systems are as important as other well-known critical systems, such as air traffic control systems or nuclear plant monitors. Unfortunately, voting systems have a history of failures that seems to indicate that their quality is not up to the task. Because of the alarming frequency and impact of the malfunctions of voting systems, in recent years a number of vulnerability analysis exercises have been carried out against voting systems to determine if they can be compromised in order to control the results of an election. We have participated in two such large-scale projects, sponsored by the Secretaries of State of California and Ohio, whose goals were to perform the security testing of the electronic voting systems used in their respective states. As the result of the testing process, we identified major vulnerabilities in all of the systems analyzed. We then took advantage of a combination of these vulnerabilities to generate a series of attacks that would spread across the voting systems and would “steal” votes by combining voting record tampering with social engineering approaches. As a response to the two large-scale security evaluations, the Secretaries of State of California and Ohio recommended changes to improve the security of the voting process. In this paper, we describe the methodology that we used in testing the two real-world electronic voting systems we evaluated, the findings of our analysis, our attacks, and the lessons we learned.

Electronic voting systems play a critical role in today's democratic societies, as they are responsible for recording and counting the citizens' votes. Unfortunately, there is an alarming number of reports describing the malfunctioning of these systems, suggesting that their quality is not up to the task. Recently, there has been a focus on the security testing of voting systems to determine if they can be compromised in order to control the results of an election. We have participated in two large-scale projects, sponsored by the Secretaries of State of California and Ohio, whose respective goals were to perform the security testing of the electronic voting systems used in those two states. The testing process identified major flaws in all the systems analyzed, and resulted in substantial changes in the voting procedures of both states. In this paper, we describe the testing methodology that we used in testing two real-world electronic voting systems, the findings of our analysis, and the lessons we learned.

Several approaches have been proposed to perform vulnerability analysis of applications written in high-level languages. However, little has been done to automatically identify security-relevant flaws in binary code. In this paper, we present a novel approach to the identification of vulnerabilities in x86 executables in ELF binary format. Our approach is based on static analysis and symbolic execution techniques. We implemented our approach in a proof-of-concept tool and used it to detect taint-style vulnerabilities in binary code. The results of our evaluation show that our approach is both practical and effective