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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 At the last two Defcons, hackers found vulnerabilities within minutes because the machines were often outdated.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: 4, Interesting) by Snotnose on Monday August 12 2019, @11:28PM
Early 80s, my company used an 8086 in a box to literally replace a wall of telemetry machines. One year at the International Telemetry Conference (ITC), held in Vegas, we were told we had a competitor. We all went to their booth only to be told "um, we dropped it getting it off the truck. But you can go to our hotel suite to see a demo". Needless to say, us low level engineers got sent (because the other company knew all the managers and sales folks at my company) to the suite only to see a tweaked box that wouldn't power up.
Never again heard from that company. As nobody had heard of them before ITC, and nobody heard of them after, we figured they were a scam.
We did get competition, which led to huge layoffs (you only made 25% profit? We promised 30% to our investors, reduce head count). But my company skated for 4-5 years on what in hindsight was a very simple and obvious thing to do.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.