DEFCON 25 Voting Machine Hacking Village: Report on Cyber Vulnerabilities in U.S. Election Equipment, Databases, and Infrastructure

Description

co-author Harri Hursti was behind the (albeit somewhat russophobic) Kill Chain: The Cyber War on Americas Elections (2020) documentary, recommended by Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ), promoter of the 2020 Arizona election audit

cf. PDF pp. 14-15, Blockchain-enabled e-voting (BEV), of How Blockchain Technology Could Change Our Lives: In-Depth Analysis (2017)

The Voting Village acquired and made available to participants over 25 pieces of election equipment including voting machines and electronic poll books. Most models are still widely used in U.S. state and local elections today. The Voting Village also featured a mock back-office training "range" to simulate databases and networks of real-world election administrators. A consequence of the limited access to voting machine hardware in the past, is that doubts have been frequently raised about if the various vulnerabilities identified in previous studies would be practical for technologists of ordinary skill to discover and exploit. At the DEFCON event, however, thousands of participants were invited to engage with and explore voting equipment and the network simulator in an environment free of restriction for the first time. The results were sobering. By the end of the conference, every piece of equipment in the Voting Village was effectively breached in some manner. Participants with little prior knowledge and only limited tools and resources were quite capable of undermining the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of these systems