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from the I'm-not-a-berliner-but-I'm-worried dept.
Proprietary Software Used In German Elections Trivial To Hack, Say CCC Researchers
Security researchers from the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) have discovered that the software used to capture, aggregate, and tabulate the votes in many German elections had multiple vulnerabilities, exposing it to trivial potential attacks.
The proprietary software, called PC-Wahl, has been used to record, analyze, and present election data in national, state, and municipal elections for decades. The CCC hackers argued that the security holes are severe enough that they could jeopardize the trust in the final results of the upcoming parliamentary election (unless the security flaws are patched by then).
Also at Chaos Computer Club: Software to capture votes in upcoming national election is insecure.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by maxwell demon on Sunday September 10 2017, @09:20PM
That's not what happens in Germany, and I'm not sure the German media would like it; currently they have the whole evening with updates of the projection. A result after three minutes would be like replacing a football game with the announcement of the result.
Note that this software is not used to count the votes. The votes are still given by paper ballot (voting machines have been declared unconstitutional by the German federal constitutional court), and counted by hand. This software is used to pass on the counting results, so that you can announce the result immediately after the counting finished.
Also note that the result announced in the evening is officially the preliminary final result; so the worst that could happen is that one or two days later, the officials have to say "oh, the preliminary results were wrong, here are the actual results." Not pretty, but certainly not a disaster either. Especially it is not possible to change the actual final result through that software, only the preliminary one.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.