    
catherine_a
Frequent Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: catherine_a
Post Number: 379
Registered: 12-2004
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 | | Posted on Friday, July 1, 2005 - 12:55 am: | |
The intriguing possibility raised by wwwill is--if I understood it correctly--that it may also be possible to embed certain kinds of functions within the hardware itself. Since wwwill is a techie and I am not, maybe he could confirm my understanding and say more about the technical possibilities of tampering that could happen affecting the manufacture of the memory cards (before any executable software is put onto the memory card). BBV has already proven that the memory cards can be hacked by putting an executable program onto the memory cards. (And Bev's last comment implies that the scanner's MUST access the memory card and possibly query for an executable in order to process the election results on the card.) I think wwwill is just saying one should also check for the potential of yet another way of impacting the memory card--by embedding certain functions within the hardware itself.
Maybe this doesn't seem obvious since evidently the Diebold code shows a mandatory query to a program of some kind software executable on the memory card. But might it not be possible that the very act of accessing the memory card (to query any executable that could have been put on the memory card) might not also "trigger" something hidden in the hardware itself? I think wwwill is also saying that one should check this, too--in addition to the proven case of putting a software program onto the memory card.
Yes. Definitely there are other intriguing possibilities. For example, the interpreter is something that should be looked at, and there are some indications that a program exists to act on the machine language. -- Bev |
