4 ms·
Why would a voting system even need to be online?
by g0dg0d 8y ago
Why would a voting system even need to be online?
- azernik 8y agoDepends what you mean by "voting system". Individual voting machines rarely are - they're usually air-gapped, read the ballot from a physical memory card transported by sneakernet from administrative offices, and write vote totals back to those cards for sneakernet transmission to same offices. However, those central locations use a lot of internet-connected machines, mostly to communicate their numbers to outside systems. The computers that program the ballot descriptions pre-election (a vector for attacking voting machines) are also usually internet-connected - they're plain old desktop workstations of some elections official. Air-gapping those systems is probably doable, at a minor loss of convenience, but there is a reason they're internet-connected.
- _bxg1 8y agoGeez, just like... Give the voting software its own isolated network, and for external reporting force somebody to dump the results to a flash drive before uploading them to the web. I'm not even a security expert, but maybe I could get a job as one working for the US government.