However, organizers of this year’s DEF CON hacker convection (concluding this Sunday) spent as much time over the physical safety of the security researchers hacking into the devices.
The researchers who examine electoral equipment for vulnerabilities have come under growing intimidation and harassment since former President Donald Trump's effort to annul the 2020 election.
In order to protect these researchers, the organizers of the conference’s ‘Voting Village’ hacking event apparently appointed undercover security consultants. Additionally, they shifted the entire event to a side room so as to monitor the activities more closely and instructed their roughly two dozen volunteers on what to do in the event in case any agitators turned up.
The measures provide a little glimpse into a trend in the landscape of voting security in the US. Election officials, poll workers, and security researchers will eventually be forced to think more carefully about physical safety and take a variety of additional safeguards as a result of the increase in threats caused by disinformation.
According to Catherine Terranova, one of the organizers of the Voting Village, last year’s DEF CON witnessed certain troubling incidents, however minor. For an instance, a conspiracy theorist apparently set the alarm bells off during the event. Also, a group of people who appeared to be committed to advancing election denialism also attended the event the previous year and harassed a few of the Voting Village speakers.
“The day after DEF CON ended last year, I started pouring all of my time and energy into figuring out how to secure this village[…]I said to myself, ‘we are never doing this like this again,” Terranova said.
This is an issue which concerns the government election security officials too.
“Any threat of violence against an election official, poll worker, or anyone else working to safeguard our democracy is completely unacceptable. These folks are members of our communities, and dedicated public servants,” CISA Director Jen Easterly said in a statement.
Introducing a New Voting Machine
Voting Village lawmakers will now be introduced with a prototype of a $10 million DARPA-funded open source voting machine, created to mitigate any hacking activities executed to temper with votes.
The project will be headed by Galois, a DARPA awarded government contractor. For a fact, Galois has worked with Microsoft in developing ElectionGuard, a software for voting machines to verify ballots.
The Galois machine reads votes on paper and scans them to ensure that they are legitimate. It will have a secure CPU that Galois developed that is geared to fend off common attacks that other voting machines were vulnerable to in prior Voting Villages.
Galois aims to provide the first voting system that hackers at Defcon will be unable to break, but in both years that the Voting Village has existed, hackers have been able to find one or the other vulnerabilities. However, even if hackers do discover flaws in the prototype, which its designers anticipate happening, it is still a win-win situation.
"There's an ambition that this demonstration will not have vulnerabilities comparable to what's in the room[…]But of course, the point of the exercise is to learn. If they do find flaws, it helps the researchers put on a different thinking cap and adjust their work over the next 2.5 years while this project continues," Joe Kiniry, a principal scientist at Galois, explained in an interview.