Def Con 27 (2019)

Defcon 27-2019
Presentations, videos, music, etc.
The DEF CON Voting Village has released its findings from DEF CON 27!

This is the third year we’ve hosted the Voting Village, and this year we were able to give attendees access to over 100 machines, all of which are currently certified for use in at least one US jurisdiction. The units tested included direct-recording electronic (DRE) voting machines, electronic poll books, Ballot Marking Devices (BMDs), Optical scanners and Hybrid systems.

The hackers at DEF CON once again compromised every single machine over the 2.5 day event, many of them with trivial attacks that require no sophistication or special knowledge on the part of the attacker. In too many cases physical ports remain unprotected, passwords remain unset or left in default configurations and security features of the underlying commercial hardware are left unused or even disabled.

In addition to showing the security weaknesses found in the wide variety of election tech on display, the Voting Village team’s report shares its strong recommendations for improving election security, most notably the urgent need for paper ballots and rigorous post-election audits.

For any of those recommendations to become real, voters need to get informed and get the attention of their elected representatives about these issues.