I developed a voting system (see www.SAVIOC.com) that uses ordinary old PCs, yet is more transparent and trustworthy than anything else in use today.  All software, including the operating system (FreeDOS) boots from a floppy that can be verified by hash code.  The PC never uses the hard drive, and doesn't even need one.  Trustworthiness comes from people with different interests being able to prevent each other from doing anything fraudulent.  I think the only significant potential vulnerability is that someone with physical access to the machines could install a malicious BIOS.  Learning about the OpenBIOS project gave me hope of overcoming that vulnerability.

 

(1)  Is my hope justified?  Can a PC be booted from a floppy that completely replaces the native BIOS in RAM, and then loads FreeDOS?  (Can the possibility of a malicious BIOS be made a non-issue?)

 

If all answers are YES, then the remaining very basic questions become important.

 

(2)  Roughly how much space on the floppy would be required?

(3)  What downloads would I need?  OpenBIOS AND OpenFirmware AND OpenBOOT?  Anything else?

(4)  How are they downloaded? 

http://www.openfirmware.info/index.php/Downloads displays a page beginning, "This page has been deleted."  All other links that imply the possibility of downloading reach a page headlined, "The page cannot be displayed".