Diebold reveals 'key' to e-voting?

Imagine if all it took to get inside widely-used Diebold electronic voting machines--perhaps with malicious intentions, such as installing tally-altering software on its memory card--was a photograph of the key to the system's physical lock.

Thanks to a little help from the e-voting outfit itself, it may actually be that simple, a security researcher from Princeton University suggested this week.

According to J. Alex Halderman, a computer science PhD student, a picture of the key published at Diebold's online store was a veritable blueprint for filing down ordinary hardware-store cabinet keys to an identical shape.

At the time, they said it would take only seconds to pick the lock guarding the machine's memory card--and beyond that, it could be opened with the same keys typically used with hotel minibars and jukeboxes. With less than one minute of physical access to a machine, a hacker could install corruptive software on the memory cards inside, the study reported.