Media Advisory

Computer security researchers from The Johns Hopkins University and Rice University today responded to an electronic voting system vendor who attacked the credibility of their study, which pointed to security flaws that could allow tampering with election results. Diebold Election Systems, whose software was evaluated by the researchers, stated in a July 30 analysis that the company did not believe the types of tampering suggested by the researchers could occur.

"Our goal in this project was to call the public's attention to some very serious security concerns that may be overlooked in our rush to adopt new electronic voting systems, problems that could jeopardize the integrity of fair and open elections," said Avi Rubin, technical director of the Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins and one of the authors of the research paper. "Although we were tempted to stand back now and allow our elected officials and the public to come to their own conclusions, we could not allow some of Diebold's attacks on our research to go unchallenged. We firmly stand behind our findings."

Technical director of the Information Security Institute at JHU, Avi Rubin, center, with doctoral students Adam Stubblefield (left) and Yoshi Kohno. Photo by Will Kirk

The researchers' technical response to Diebold's analysis of their work has been posted at this Web address: avirubin.com/vote/response.html.

Rubin, Information Security Institute researchers Yoshi Kohno and Adam Stubblefield, and Rice University computer scientist Dan Wallach released a technical report July 23 concerning security flaws in Diebold software that had been posted on a public Web site. The report has triggered a vigorous public discussion of electronic voting involving state and local election supervisors, members of Congress, technology researchers, members of the public and electronic voting system vendors.

The news release concerning this research can be found here: www.jhu.edu/news_info/news/home03/jul03/rubin.html. The original technical report is online here: avirubin.com/vote.pdf.

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