The Diana Initiative 2020

Election security in the United States is one of the most complex and difficult cybersecurity challenges facing our country today. Outdated and vulnerable equipment, chronic underfunding, untrained personnel, and a bewildering diversity of jurisdictions and laws are only the beginning of the problems the country faces going into the 2020 election cycle, and experts agree that little to nothing has been done to solve them. All of this in addition to the struggles the country faces with the onslaught of COVID-19. 
In 2017, the DEF CON Voting Machine Hacking Village was convened by myself and my fellow organizers, Matt Blaze, Harri Hursti, and Jake Braun. Together, we opened up the previously restricted voting machinery for public, good-faith hacking efforts to explore and educate the security challenges inherent in these machines. In my talk, I will be giving an overview of the overall state of the industry for election security in the U.S. going back to the 2000 Florida recount. Among the topics, I’ll be addressing are how the industry got to its current state, what we can do to improve it, and the individual findings of the three DEF CON Voting Machine Hacking Village reports released since 2017. Our findings have also been featured in a newly released HBO documentary, "Kill Chain".