J. Alex Halderman on the blog Freedom to Tinker reports the arrest of Hari Prasad, an Indian colleague who coauthored a research paper detailing serious security flaws in India’s electronic voting machines.
The research paper has produced a hot debate in India, according to Halderman: “Many commentators have called for the machines to be scrapped, and 16 political parties representing almost half of the Indian parliament have expressed serious concerns about the use of electronic voting.”
Halderman, now an assistant professor at the University of Michigan, did his graduate work in computer security under Princeton’s Ed Felten, director of the Center for Information Technology Policy.
Several years ago a research paper by Felten, Halderman and Ariel Feldman demonstrated the hackability (is that a word?) of Diebold voting machines — causing quite a stir. That’s Halderman just behind Felten’s right shoulder in the opening of this clip from 2007 congressional testimony. Halderman also appears in this 2006 piece from Fox News. And here is the original Diebold research video, which quickly became a top pick on the then-nascent Youtube.
Earlier this month Halderman and Feldman unveiled a new research project demonstrating the vulnerability of touch-screen voting machines by reprogramming one to run Pac-Man. Read more on Geek.com. and on Wired.
