EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:
The security of voting machines is essential to keeping political processes safe, open, and fair. At times, it feels like trial and error, as governments work to ensure that voting machines stay safe from cyberthreats.
Defcon Voting Village, a security conference to analyze voting machine irregularities brings together top hackers and security experts, including U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Conference attendees were successful in finding vulnerabilities, such as:
- Easily guessable hardcoded system credentials
- Potential for operation system manipulation
- Susceptibility to compromised memory and remote denial of service attacks
- Repeated instances of poor physical security protections that could lead to tampering
These vulnerabilities are not new. Some were discovered over a decade ago through local audits and academic research.
It appears election security in the U.S. is still not hack-proof. Many states are replacing, machines or removing them altogether. With the 2020 elections on the horizon, the U.S. needs to mitigate the election security information gap and ensure elections are safe and secure.
To read more about the results of Defcon Voting Village and the work to keep voting machines safe, check out this Wired article.
