Reply #3: Quote from the "Call and Post" [View All]

"So it was most unusual to find the industry leader being discredited in a report created by a couple of Johns Hopkins Univ. grad students. In what appeared to be a code-cracking homework assignment, the students prepared a report that directly contradicts information provided by Robyn M. Downs, elections administrator of Prince George's County, MD..."

last I checked these "grad students" are actually Avi Rubin, technical director of the John Hopkins Information Security Institute, Rice University computer-science professor Dan Wallach, and two John Hopkins grad students Tadayoshi Kohno & Adam Stubblefield. I would heed the security concerns of information security EXPERTS before Robyn Downs, Elections Administrator of Prince George's County MD. Nowhere does Diebold, or Call and Post backup their claim that this was just a homework assignment. The burden of proof regarding security still lies with Diebold, and other voting machine manufacturers.

http://reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=technologyNews&storyID=3155955

"It's unfortunate to find flaws in a system as potentially important as this one," Tadayoshi Kohno, a graduate student at the John Hopkins Information Security Institute, said in a telephone interview.

While researchers said they did not know for sure whether the software had been used in voting situations, they said comments and copyright notices in the code indicated that it was legitimate.

"I have no proof that this is what's running in their systems, but I would bet it's pretty close," said Avi Rubin, technical director of the Information Security Institute.

Rubin, Kohno, Johns Hopkins graduate student Adam Stubblefield, and Rice University computer-science professor Dan Wallach said they had uncovered several flaws in the system.