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Description

I was a member of the UCSB Security Group that completed an analysis of the Sequoia electronic voting system as part of a Top-to-Bottom Review of the electronic voting systems used in California. The study was commissioned by California Secretary of State Debra Bowen. As a result of the review, the Secretary of State decertified the current systems and recertified them on condition of use of stricter procedures and security measures.

We acted as a "Red Team" and performed a series of security tests of both the hardware and the software that are part of the Sequoia system to identify possible security problems that could lead to a compromise.

We were able to expose a number of serious security issues. We were able to bypass both the physical and the software security protections of the Sequoia system, and we demonstrated how these vulnerabilities could be exploited by a determined attacker to modify (or invalidate) the results of an election.

Our team was led by Giovanni Vigna and Richard Kemmerer, and, besides me, included Davide Balzarotti, Greg Banks, Viktoria Felmetsger, William Robertson, and Fredrik Valeur.

Publications

We published our findings in a technical report. The Secretary of State released the public version of our report on July 27th, 2007. We also published a rebuttal of the vendor response to our report.

Press

The Top-To-Bottom Review received considerable attention in the media. Here are the references to some of the articles, videos, and radio programs that covered the topic.

TVs

Radios

Newspapers

Magazines and Journals

Blogs and Web Sites