DARPA to Test Secure Open Source Voting Box at DEFCON 2019
The United States Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is funding the research and development of a secure open source voting system. The $10 million dollar contract was handed to Oregon-based tech company Galois, which has worked with other government agencies like the Department of Homeland Security and NASA. The project is part of DARPA’s System Security Integrated Through Hardware and Firmware (SSITH), which is developing hardware security architectures and tools that are better protected from hardware vulnerabilities exploited in software. DARPA ultimately hopes to build secure chip-level processors that thwart hardware hacks as well as software-borne attacks.
DARPA will bring a demonstration version of a secure voting ballot box to the DEF CON 2019 Voting Machine Hacking Village (Voting Village) this weekend. Daniel Zimmerman, Galois principle researcher said, “We are providing the source code specifications, tests, and actually even providing participants at DEF CON with an easy way of actually putting their own malicious software into [the devices], we’re not daring them but actually helping them break this.”
The system will use fully open source voting software, instead of the closed, proprietary software currently used in the majority of voting machines…
