Re: OT| U.S. democracy in peril

From: Rand Simberg (simberg.interglobal_at_org.trash)
Date: 11/12/04 

Date: Fri, 12 Nov 2004 03:18:01 GMT

On Fri, 12 Nov 2004 01:12:47 +0100, in a place far, far away, Andrew
Nowicki <andrew@nospam.com> made the phosphor on my monitor glow in
such a way as to indicate that:

>"Dr. Avi Rubin is currently Professor of Computer Science at John
>Hopkins University. He accidentally got his hands on a copy of the
>Diebold software program -- Diebold's source code -- which runs
>their e-voting machines.
>
>Dr. Rubin's students pored over 48,609 lines of code that make up
>this software. One line in particular stood out over all the rest:
>
>#define DESKEY ((des_key*) "F2654hd4")
>
>All commercial programs have provisions to be encrypted so as to
>protect them from having their contents read or changed by anyone not
>having the key. The line that staggered the Hopkin's team was that the
>method used to encrypt the Diebold machines was a method called
>Digital Encryption Standard (DES), a code that was broken in 1997 and
>is NO LONGER USED by anyone to secure programs. F2654hd4 was the key
>to the encryption. Moreover, because the KEY was IN the source code,
>all Diebold machines would respond to the same key.
>
>I can't believe there is a person alive who wouldn't understand the
>reason this was allowed to happen. This wasn't a mistake but a fixed
>election."

<rolling eyes at whacko conspiracy monger?

Yeah, tell it to the Marines...

Relevant Pages

  • Re: perl source code encryption
    ... I want to encrypt my perl source code. ... So how to encrypt all perl codes includes the modules. ... If all you are trying to do is add a hurdle for them to jump take a ...
    (perl.beginners)
  • Re: Encrypted software backups?
    ... If you have some way to escrow the decryption key, ... Another way is to simply release the source code to your clients under ... else with cryptography) requires knowing what you're doing in order to ... If you really want to encrypt your code like that, ...
    (sci.crypt)
  • Re: Locking code in VB 6.0
    ... If you mean the source code, there's nothing to keep people from looking at ... it unless you encrypt it. ... Use Winzip. ... strength" encryption and password protection. ...
    (microsoft.public.vb.general.discussion)
  • Re: how to hide source code
    ... If you truly encrypt, you'd have to have something on the client to decrypt. ... to understand your source code. ...
    (microsoft.public.frontpage.programming)