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LAS VEGAS—A blue box on display here at the DEF CON security conference could make voting machines much more secure—and the circuitry inside might do the same for consumer gadgets.
But the technology demonstrated by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and Portland, Ore-based Galois won’t be ready in time to secure voting machines in the 2020.
Still, when it does hit the market, the tech could help put a stop to some of the more common cyber attacks on your connected devices.
Tap here to vote
The voting experience of the DARPA/Galois hardware at the Voting Village exhibit might not seem different from that of the obsolete voting machines lined up for inspection nearby.
You choose answers to such questions as “Favorite Star Wars Movie” and “Correct Pronunciation of GIF” on a touchscreen, a paper prints out with your choices and a QR code storing them, and you feed that into a scanner.
But the circuit board inside a blue frame attached to that scanner incorporates the work of DARPA’s System Security Integration Through Hardware and Firmware project—SSITH for short.
“Yes, we did kind of make that fit inside the acronym,” program manager Linton Salmon said of the Star Wars reference during a talk Friday.
SSITH aims to build processors on open-source architectures that resist most common hacking techniques at the hardware level, if at some cost in performance.
“Most of the manufacturers of processors over the last 15 to 20 years have been primarily concerned with performance and power,” said Galois researcher Dan Zimmerman in an interview Saturday. One objective of this project is to quantify the cost of this added security in those areas.
Next year at DEF CON, this team hopes to see five different polling-place demos built on this design. But it would fall to other parties to ship voting hardware—as Salmon emphasized in an interview Saturday, “The SSITH program is not about voting results and security.”
That’s because their ambitions exceed elections. Processors that shrug off such common tactics as buffer overflows (in which an attacker shoves excess data into an input field, causing a crash that opens memory in which hostile code can run) would help in areas from connected appliances to supercomputers.
Our long national hangover continues
We’re having this conversation about safer electronic voting hardware because of an overreaction almost 20 years ago to usability problems with old-school ballots that erupted in the 2000 election and its travails with punch-card ballots.
The quickly-passed Help America Vote Act mandated replacing old, analog voting machines with newer and smarter models. Vendors met that demand with a round of devices built on general-purpose Windows platforms at a time when Microsoft (MSFT) was much more innocent about network threats.