The most significant, he said, is a coding flaw that allows an attacker who gains access to a jurisdiction’s central election computers to spread malware to the ImageCast X machines. vulnerabilities” Halderman found.īut Halderman, who has said publicly that he has no evidence that the machines’ flaws were exploited, told The Post that the vulnerabilities were serious and could be used by an attacker. Sterling said that like CISA, Mitre found that existing procedural safeguards observed by election offices “make it extremely unlikely for any bad actor to actually exploit the. “That is why procedural, operational, and legal election integrity measures are crucial.” “Both the CISA and Mitre reports show what reasonable people already know - if bad actors are given full and unfettered access to any system, they can manipulate that system,” said Gabriel Sterling, a top aide to Raffensperger, in a statement. The report, which was commissioned by Dominion, was not released publicly. The advisory comes as a report released Friday by The Mitre Corporation, a federally funded research and development center, reached similar conclusions to those of CISA, according to the office of the Georgia Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger. The lawsuit over machine security is about to enter its sixth year, and unfounded claims of fraud continue to animate Republican voters and elected officials. The advisory is expected to be released next week after officials in all 50 states are notified.ĬISA’s disclosure, however, is unlikely to settle the matter. The plaintiffs now argue that this replacement system is still too vulnerable to manipulation, and that Georgia should adopt a system of hand-marked paper ballots that can be scanned and tabulated by machine.ĬISA’s five-page advisory is based in part on Halderman’s 100-page report, which remains under seal in a federal court in Atlanta. Georgia agreed to acquire a new system and in 2019 bought Dominion ImageCast X “ballot-marking devices,” which were first used in 2020. The plaintiffs - a group of voters and voting security activists - argued that the paperless touch-screen machines Georgia was then using, which were made by a different company, were so lacking in security that they violated voters’ civil rights. Alex Halderman, served as an expert for plaintiffs who filed the case in 2017. The lead researcher, University of Michigan computer scientist J. This makes it very unlikely that these vulnerabilities could affect an election.”ĬISA conducted its review in response to a report by two researchers prepared as part of long-running litigation over the security of Georgia’s voting system. “Of note, states’ standard election security procedures would detect exploitation of these vulnerabilities and in many cases would prevent attempts entirely. “We have no evidence that these vulnerabilities have been exploited and no evidence that they have affected any election results,” said Brandon Wales, CISA’s executive director in a statement to The Post. The flaws, many of which are highly technical and which mostly stem from machine design as opposed to coding errors, generally require an attacker to have physical access to the devices or other equipment used to manage the election, CISA said. It can also be used as a paperless electronic voting machine. The ImageCast X allows voters to mark their candidate choices on a touch-screen and then produce a paper record, as was the case in Georgia. There are nine flaws affecting versions of the machine called the Dominion Voting Systems Democracy Suite ImageCast X, according to a copy of an advisory prepared by CISA and obtained by The Washington Post. The security of Dominion voting machines has become a flash point in the fraught politics of the 2020 election with supporters of former president Donald Trump claiming that the results were tainted by machines that were manipulated, while election officials - including Georgia’s Republican secretary of state and governor - insisted that there was no evidence of breaches or altered results.
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