Election Reform

DARPA Is Building a $10 Million, Open Source, Secure Voting System

The first-of-its-kind system will be designed by an Oregon-based firm called Galois, a longtime government contractor with experience in designing secure and verifiable systems. The system will use fully open source voting software, instead of the closed, proprietary software currently used in the vast majority of voting machines, which no one outside of voting machine testing labs can examine. More importantly, it will be built on secure open source hardware, made from secure designs and techniques developed over the last year as part of a special program at DARPA. The voting system will also be designed to create fully verifiable and transparent results so that voters don’t have to blindly trust that the machines and election officials delivered correct results.

But DARPA and Galois won’t be asking people to blindly trust that their voting systems are secure—as voting machine vendors currently do. Instead they’ll be publishing source code for the software online and bring prototypes of the systems to the Def Con Voting Village this summer and next, so that hackers and researchers will be able to freely examine the systems themselves and conduct penetration tests to gauge their security. They’ll also be working with a number of university teams over the next year to have them examine the systems in formal test environments.

“Def Con is great, but [hackers there] will not give us as much technical details as we want [about problems they find in the systems],” Linton Salmon, program manager in DARPA’s Microsystems Technology Office who is overseeing the project, said in a phone call. “Universities will give us more information. But we won’t have as many people or as high visibility when we do it with universities.”...

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/yw84q7/darpa-is-building-a-dollar10-million-open-source-secure-voting-system

Unless the hardware is opensource as well, particularly networking features.....

Only as secure and accurate as the weakest link in the chain.