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from the election-won-by-over-25-billion-votes dept.
Galois's prototype voting machine wasn't available for hackers to test.
For the majority of Defcon, hackers couldn't crack the $10 million secure voting machine prototypes that DARPA had set up at the Voting Village. But it wasn't because of the machine's security features that the team had been working on for four months. The reason: technical difficulties during the machines' setup.
Eager hackers couldn't find vulnerabilities in the DARPA-funded project during the security conference in Las Vegas because a bug in the machines didn't allow hackers to access their systems over the first two days. (DARPA is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.) Galois brought five machines, and each one had difficulties during the setup, said Joe Kiniry, a principal research scientist at the government contractor.
"They seemed to have had a myriad of different kinds of problems," the Voting Village's co-founder Harri Hursti said. "Unfortunately, when you're pushing the envelope on technology, these kinds of things happen."
It wasn't until the Voting Village opened on Sunday morning that hackers could finally get a chance to look for vulnerabilities on the machine. Kiniry said his team was able to solve the problem on three of them and was working to fix the last two before Defcon ended.
The Voting Village was started in 2017 for hackers to find vulnerabilities on machines that are used in current elections. At the last two Defcons, hackers found vulnerabilities within minutes because the machines were often outdated. The Village shines a necessary light on security flaws for voters as lawmakers seek to pass an election security bill in time for the 2020 presidential election.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by pipedwho on Monday August 12 2019, @10:18PM
What is 'cutting edge' about something that could be done securely with 1970's technology (and crypto algorithms developed in the 1990's)?
Oh that's right, we have to hack up totally insecure readily available 'computer systems' that offers no real benefits and major drawbacks. So all the 'cutting edge' work is about getting system security back to a secure baseline from 50 years ago. Great stuff. I applaud those clever boys and girls at DARPA.
The purported reason for replacing paper ballots is a red herring IMO. It is a feature not a bug that it requires additional manpower proportional to the number of people voting. This means the concentration of power isn't so focused when something goes awry. This allows the local regions to do the individual counts, the next level to run the higher level counts, etc. With multiple counters and verifiers from adversarial parties, this makes it very difficult to subvert the counting process, and much more likely to get discovered, identified and prosecuted.
Replacing that potential set of people with machines so you can 'take the men out of the loop' so to speak, simply makes it so less people are required. This means, less people invested in the election process, less eyeballs on the process, and probably by extension less people voting at all due to disenfranchisement. These I expect are features that benefit everyone except 'the people' by making it easier to subvert the system from multiple perspectives: statistics of voter turn out, concentration of failure (where all parties possibly assume will be a benefit to themselves), easier to manipulate a populace less invested in their political governance, pork barrel projects for machine development and manufacture, etc.