Critical Discovery During Wisconsin Recount: Cellular Connectivity of Tabulators

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23. Anything communicating over a network has bidirectional protocols

Most protocols have gaps in them, a lot of them left over from decades ago. For example, a classic hack is what's called a script injection. Instead of filling in a "Name" field on a web page with a name, you instead put in a little string of HTML or SQL commands. When the server received the "Name", if it's not smart enough to handle it correctly, it may inadvertently run the code.

Same thing with network data. It has a packet format it expects to get, but if it's not well designed and you send it crap, you can make it do unexpected things. A frightening number of these electronic voting machines run very old software. I'm talking Windows 95-era. Back when people were first figuring out how to make things secure. Even a connection that's only supposed to send still has to receive something back to maintain the connection, leaving just enough exposure for somebody to get his foot in the door.

So, in theory, if the software has enough flaws in it, a hacker could worm through them and execute foreign code on the election machine, thus doing something unexpected. All without ever going near the machine.

This is why very high security systems often have a gap. The computers are simply not connected to any outside network, thus avoiding all potential security flaws. Getting data on and off the network requires using intermediate physical media, which means physical contact with the machine. Ideally, electronic voting machines would be configured that way.