October 29, 2003
Government
How not to secure your voting software.
Jeremiah Akin just emailed me a pointer to a story in Wired, "E-Vote Software Leaked Online." It appears that Sequoia Voting Systems has screwed up almost as badly as Diebold did, leaving unencrypted binaries of its software on a publically-accessible FTP site where literally anyone at all could download and examine or modify it.
Oops.
Once again proving that "security through obscurity" is about the most insecure method there is.
I note that in the wake of the Wired article, Jaguar Computer Systems, the owners of the ftp site, has disabled anonymous access. The damage has been done, though.