Friday, July 20, 2018: 5:00 pm (Vaughan): Modern electronic voting systems are notoriously vulnerable to attack, and the 2016 election was perhaps the first time we saw evidence of state actors attempting to compromise local election system infrastructure. But how insecure are the actual voting systems we use? And how can the average hacker get access to these systems to find out firsthand? Last year, the speakers organized the first ever Voting System Hacking Village at Defcon, in which the community was invited to example, take apart, and hack several real voting systems used in U.S. elections. Many exploitable vulnerabilities were discovered or reproduced over the course of the weekend. This talk will describe how the voting village was organized, the technical and legal challenges in doing so, and how you too can (legally!) obtain and hack real election equipment. The background and requirements for secure elections will also be discussed, as well as how technology can both hurt and help these requirements.

Matt Blaze, Harri Hursti, Margaret MacAlpine