[Fsfe-ie] perspective on e-voting

[Justin Mason]

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Fergal Daly writes:
>On Mon, Mar 01, 2004 at 02:07:20AM -0000, Niall Douglas wrote:
>> If people will insist on using off the shelf components, they will 
>> have this problem. When I was working for EuroFighter, I was appalled 
>> to discover they use x86 kit and Windows which is totally unsuitable.
>> 
>> Commercial off the shelf kit is mass produced cheaply. It's not of 
>> high quality and certainly not of high security. As an example, DEC 
>> VMS didn't have a single root exploit in 17 years.
>
>The voting machines are using m68k and a very small custom OS which is
>little more than a loader. It's probably very secure as it had almost no
>functionality. It's also got ECC RAM.

BTW if Niall's suggesting using tamper-resilient military-spec hardware,
I think the cost increases would scupper the project immediately.
I get the impression it's a lot easier to spend that kind of money
when it's coming out of a "black budget" ;)

- --j.
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