In early 2008, New Jersey election officials announced that they planned to send one or more Sequoia Advantage voting machines to Ed Felten and Andrew Appel (also of Princeton University) for analysis. In March 2008, Sequoia sent an e-mail to Professor Felten asserting that allowing him to examine Sequoia voting machines would violate the license agreement between Sequoia and the county which bought them, and also that Sequoia would take legal action "to stop [...] any non-compliant analysis, [...] publication of Sequoia software, its behavior, reports regarding same or any other infringement of our intellectual property." This action sparked outrage among computer technology activists.
In February 2008, Felten and his students were part of the team that discovered the cold boot attack, which allows someone with physical access to a computer to bypass operating system protections and extract the contents of its memory.