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Electronic Voting Machine Hacked to Run 'Pac-Man'

by Terrence O'Brien on August 19, 2010 at 06:30 PM

Pac-Man Running on a Voting Machine
Electronic voting machines are notoriously buggy and hackable. Even the manufacturers of DRE (direct recording electronic) voting talliers have admitted so much. Some states have even gone as far as to ban the touchscreen devices. While they may not be great at recording votes (or leaving a paper trail), it turns out their outdated PC-like innards are perfect for playing retro arcade games. This particular machine, the AVC Edge, houses a 486 processor and 32 MB of RAM, making it about as powerful as a 15-year-old PC. Researchers J. Alex Halderman from the University of Michigan, and Princeton's Ariel J. Feldman managed to open the machine, overwrite the embedded psOS+ operating system with the more pedestrian DOS, and install 'Pac-Man' -- all without leaving any evidence that the machine had been physically altered (aside from the ghosts chasing a yellow circle around the screen, that is).

Thankfully, states are phasing out these machines, so the obvious security concerns are less of an issue. Now, we need to figure out what to do with the thousands of devices that could soon be piling up in our landfills. This proves they'd make a pretty decent (and cheap) vintage arcade machine for homes nationwide. [From: University of Michigan, via: Slashdot]

Tags: avc edge, AvcEdge, ElectronicVoting, ElectronicVotingMachines, PacMan, research, security, top, videogames, voting, votingmachines

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