More E-Voting Problems

In a new wrinkle on security concerns about e-voting, a Diebold voting machine key is copied from a photo on the Diebold website [via Boing Boing]. According to this article, the keys for all of the voting machines are the same, are very simple, and a detailed photo was available online until this story came out. Once one has a key, the machine is open to sabatoge, including code insertion to transparently modify election results. The availability of the photo is almost an example of seemingly trivial information being potentially compromising in the wrong hands, except it doesn’t seem that tricky to realize that you probably ought not put a close up photo of a key, or really any security device, on the internet. Even if you can’t make a copy based on the photo, you’ll learn a lot about what it will likely take to pick the lock. A company under so much scrutiny for their security really ought to know better.