E-vote vendors submit software for safekeeping
But critics say the vendor move won't guarantee integrity of system

Dan Verton

OCTOBER 27, 2004 (COMPUTERWORLD) - WASHINGTON -- With less than a week to go before the presidential election and concerns still lingering about the integrity and security of the software used by tens of thousands of electronic voting machines, five voting machine makers agreed to submit their software to the National Software Reference Library (NSRL) for safekeeping, federal officials said yesterday.

[...] Security experts and grass-roots voter advocacy groups, however, are skeptical of the vendor move.

Avi Rubin, a professor at Johns Hopkins University and a leading critic of the security controls put in place by e-voting system vendors, called the reference library "smoke and mirrors." The real threat to the election, he said, is that if "the code is already rigged, storing the hashes only guarantees the malicious code will be there if the hashes match."

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