Why Did The Voting System Go To Therapy? Because It Was Feeling A Little "Rigged"

uh so first of all thank you for having me uh my name is har Hy originally from Finland nowadays living on refugee camp called cringe Connecticut and it's a refugee camp because we all tax refugees over there so first of all I have 127 slides I'm not going to read the slides so I'm going to go through slides with a very fast pace and skipping some of the well skipping a lot of the contents that's explain the most important things so first of all who I am and why I'm talking about this I got into election mess completely accidentally uh aan Sano who was election supervisor of talasi Florida capital of Florida he convinced me that

when year 2000 Bush versus core recount was stopped by Supreme Court he didn't get the answers he didn't know what was true and what not so he convinced me to start looking into his voting machines and he give me a gentleman's code of honor that whatever I found he will be not uh good in gak or or in Junction I can talk about it and he was good for his word and so that's how all all of this H started I was not interested about this topic at all I wasn't believing the story is told to me and then I found out the horrible truth that these mchines are not even good high school projects they are designed at a

time where cyber warfare was science fiction uh there was no security consideration whatsoever in most of the time and you know some of these machines actually use encryption like crc1 13 or crc16 and Rod 13 is probably very strong in that phase too so these really don't have any any secutive in place at the same time when we did an everage study back in 2007 we found a 381 pages of vulnerabilities and most of them are still in use unpatched so all of the vulnerabilities are not but best variety of those are there we have been trying to get not only voting Village but me personally uh this message out understanding what is true and what is

not what yes the machines are vulnerable but then explaining how they are vulnerable and fighting the misinformation disinformation which is around uh and making everything real these are two movies I help to make uh hacking democracy was HBO documentary and the later one killchain HBO documentary too both of them were Emy nominated for uh interes journalism yes we didn't win but at least we tried anyway so this is not announcement of any new hack this is all about telling what is what the story of what the US elections are because every single country has their different flavor of Elections it's not the same everywhere so question becomes what is the what how us is doing the elections how some other

countries are doing the elections what are the unique vulnerabilities and especially why you cannot ever go and say well that country is doing well let's copy that no that doesn't work because we have very different idea of what democracy is so how it all started this is the iconic picture of 2000 uh pregnant shat hanging shat all kinds of shat so basically when they were looking for the Punch Cards and trying to figure out what the problem is America did what America does so they were embarrassed and they decided that this is a good time to throw about $3 billion dollar of money into the problem and there was no security standards actually the the only standards which

were still which were existing were abolished because the Bush Administration when they were huning out the money decided that elections need Innovation and all the regulation and PES security standards are just stopping and H hampering down Innovation so abolishing all security standards and handing out the money with our security standards was a political Choice by Bush Administration bush is was Republican president at the time when hav happened so none of this this is accidental so what is election looking like this is the year 2000 ballot in the first uh primary election so as you see the number of candidates even in a small state like New Hampshire is well well a little bit more than just two

candidates in in primaries you have two kinds of primaries you have a censuses and you have primaries primaries are conducted by law law censes are private a meetings and and town meeting type of of Ching your your Electoral College members they are not CED by law now what the actual election ballots this is a very simple ballot for election day it's only two sides and not that many races this is simple when we start looking a more common one this is a still a simple side and when we look what what it can be there are many places where you have a three three or four sides of ballot in a general election general election the

ballot is simpler than in midterms and in in in special elections the largest ballot I have seen is 12 sides so six pages both sides to vote that was in in San dieago California so these elections cannot be conducted by human count because human error rate in those tiny little a uh how tight the the how small this the margin of error is a margin of Victory it cannot be done human so we have to do it in computer at the same time we cannot trust the computers being used and absolutely the only way to do it right now is with paper ballot because we don't have a technology available for us to conduct elections with electronic

voting so in Ohio when we started with the Everest and ever since every single voting machine we have ever had an independent study anywhere from the world we have been able to hack in rest than two weeks most of the machines are hacked in less than 48 hours that's how good these are and when I say less than two weeks that's because sometimes we get five or six systems at the same time so we start to go one by one but this is really telling how these systems are horrible and actually this system here which is a high-speed scanner used usually to process tens of thousands of ballots it's still using Zip drive that's really

the storage me it's unx based and if you PL put in a a zip drive with the update those sh it runs at the route without telling User it's doing it so anyway what could possibly go wrong uh so we are right now using a general purpose computers and general purpose operating systems in most of the time in elections in every time when it's a central tabulator yes but it's very common that there's no secure boot there is no sign code absolutely not and if there's any kind of encryption that is purely for marketing purposes so it really doesn't tell you anything about it and this is even more worse because new technology coming in in

electronic poll books and all of that area is bringing in more general purpose uh repurpose tablets repurpose systems which have been not even hardened if you look the election uh system pictures have been published from uh Georgia the dominan system you see that the the russian-made computer games which comes with the standard Dell are still installed they didn't even remove that so no hardening no nothing again what is the TR trusted Supply saying that doesn't exist so there's no confirmation in in reality in most of the places in no nowhere in the real sense but even in a theater way that the code you're running is actually the code which have been certified to be

running and that's obviously big part of the problem you there's no verification if you look the some of the systems which have hash the claim itself hashes itself but actually it just prints out constant string which is your hash to be verified so absolutely no security whatsoever in in that sense and we we really have only now with the executive order 1428 which came in uh May 2011 started in the federal government looking into the software supply chain security Hardware S software uh supply chain even worse at the to time but software supply chain is right now coming as a focus area elections are always 30 years behind of rest of the of the of the industry so still in an

election area the vendors are tricker happy and use the legal offenses to try to keep every the research uh not happening so what is the the standard level when I said there doesn't the standards doesn't exist there's no enforcable standards the certification is done against volunteer voting system guidelines volunteer voting system guidelines which means that the vendor can choose what part of the volunteer standards they use first of all we have a volunteer guidelines one 1.0 1.1 2.0 and 3.0 is right now the newest one every single system use has been CER fight against 1.0 because there's no reason the vendors don't want to look to newer guidelines at the same time is ITA model under independent test Authority

which means that the vendor is paying the the test Authority and the vendor is negotiating with the test authory how the testing is done and in certain cases which is part of the uh killchain document California the certifi started using nist standard Federal uh information proection standard and they got imil fired they no no no we don't want to do that kind of testing no no no we want to have our kind of testing so when I say there's no standard literally it means there's no standards the only standards which are really tested is does it electrocute the voter does it electrocute the the accident the pole worker how high you can drop it and how it how it works in

the warm moisture of Florida and mentioning about warm uh moisture of Florida when you saw the hanging shots what happened there is that the people were given stylus to manually punch the the paper card but when you had a multiple have very popular candidate all the shats pushed out of the punch card stacked underneath the ballot and now you think about that more popular the voter is the more popular candidate is more paper is stacked underneath and then the senior citizens 80-year-old with AAR is trying to push it I'm a big guy I couldn't push it after 300 votes have been cast for a certain candidate and the whole 2,000 mess could have been avoided by simple

instruction shake the table once an hour so that it will have spread the the the shats that was the only thing needed and we would have never had this mess well this is showing how all the elections how narrow the margins are so that's why the human error in human error in count even when it's not under stress situation of election night the error count is easily 2 three% in the first count and 19 elections out of 50 are decided with a less than 1% margin which means a human count has error margin way too high for this so what is US elections looking like well the 210 million registered voters and you have a six uh almost a

180,000 precincts well the idea here is that you build a ad hoc networks in every single place when you have a precinct which have multiple EOL books and whatnot so they are all ad hoc networks and the vendors have been lobbying very wisely that these systems are not connected to Internet which means they they were lobbing the manri if you have two firewalls you are not connected to Internet it's okay to say you are not connected to Internet if you have two firewalls it doesn't tell that the firewalls have to be configured or in a packet foring chain or powered on it's a checklist you have two firewalls you're not connected to Internet we will get

back to that so the technology also comes from with a a lot of different variations it's not only the we are over focusing right now into the vote tabulation vote vote accounting systems we are not looking all of the systems there and any any one of these systems in a marri of inter country systems if you hack that you can outome affect the outcome if you are changing the districting if you are enable to uh disiz the voters with that way EOL books voter registration databases the election knite reporting there's a myriad of systems there and all of these systems are interconnected and some of these systems have to be internet facing like voter registration systems and still you have

data flows from one system another so every single system in the election environment is connected to Internet either directly or indirectly every other statement is just hogwash and election systems are National Security Systems because governments can be changed by bullets or ballots that's the hard fact and election is unique problem for the reason that unlike any other system you have to get it right this is more than Six Sigma system but there is no correcting errors afterwards so you have to get it right the other problem is that you have to have auditable results and at the same time you have to have secret ballot secret ballot means that even if the voter is cooperating even if

the voter wants to reveal how the person vote how I voted I shouldn't be able to convince you that I how I voted because if I'm able to prove how I voted then vote buying vote selling and ceron comes into play and all of these are felonies and serious felonies when we are living in Liberal cities we don't see the whole influence the whole landscape and voter ceron is a big part of problem in elections whether you look Estonia in Europe or us what in every country so that's the that is a major problem we tend to forget and we tend to forget the problem because in our environment we don't see it in Estonia they try to claim that

electronic voting is possible because you can vote as many times as you want but the last vote counts what it means is that on a Friday when internet voting stops they are voting parties everybody comes in the restaurant all the mobile phones goes into a bowl and after that we they vote in a single laptop and your friend is checking that you vot it right only after internet voting is over then everybody gets their phone back now of course you can still vote again on an election day except that they have church services on Sundays and did that day the church services start very early and last very long it's amazing thing what you learn when you are doing

investigation and talk with the taxi drivers because they explain exactly how everything works and actually that's how I went to these election parties where people are voting and your friend is is checking your vote another part which a A pecularity in the US and a lot of people don't understand even in us this in us a lot of the new technologies try to be pushed through by saying well military voters overseas they need to they they didn't help to vote so that's why it has to be they have to be allowed to do internet voting there's two things first of all in us there are laws saying everybody have to have the same method of voting so if you allow internet

voting for one one group of people then you have to allow it to everyone else the second part is the only people in the whole United States who don't have a legal right to guarantee secret ballot is military so military voters are actually have a less in security than any other voter group in us so when we look for testing the problem is parallel testing doesn't work we already know parallel testing doesn't work from the Volkswagen Scandal when the car new I'm being tested but there are number of other reasons why the testing methods which have been proposed are absolutely nonfunctional so only repeated testing and penetration testing works and this is a new thing in in election area where

they are starting to look into the possibility of implementing uh penetration testing but they are far from that the term red test red teing is all the time used in the US and then red teing well we did the red teing is cost the $3,000 yes sir so there's a lot of hogwash and a lot of misunderstanding what different things work were and All is fair in Love and War and stealing your votes and your assets so the whole threat model how us is looking election has been wrong and gradually wrong so in the traditionally the thinking in the US was the only threat is internal Threat by a support of dishonest candidate who wants to win us elections until very

recently hadn't considered a foreign influence hadn't considered a nation state attacker and haven't considered a threat actor who actually doesn't care who wins and loses maybe they have a preference but who wins and loses because the main aspect and the main goal is just to show chaos and Discord so this these models have been completely misunderstood so in us the the identification who is your potential adversary is missing and has been misguided there's no security standards which can be enforced there is no methodology in place of any kind of systematic testing in certification and still you're trying to be using the system and that's why instead of trust but verify this has to be never

trust and always verify in our head election system is very simple you take one vote you add it and off you go this is an oversimplified reference model of oversimplified voting system used in the US this is what the reality is this doesn't even have the voter registration the EOL books it doesn't have the voter election night reporting this is the ideal oversimplified model this is what the Real Models use like this is an actual ual one of the two largest voting system vendors how the system works and the funny thing is you see it here zip discs you see pcmi cards which is literally is pcmi static Ram cards you have compact flash cards you have all

kind of things which are from the past and actually the fact that it has my SQL means it's very new system because the cobal is still a a predominant language in some of the systems and in a lot of these systems the whole encryption is really or either non-existing or it is a purely decorative for example one system vendor who is claiming that our system everything is encrypted well everything is not encrypted but those files who are encrypted have the naked encryption key for symmetric key in the file itself in the beginning so of course Key Management is hard problem that way that's why we always have your key handy but the bigger problem is a lot of the systems who claim that

they are using encryption they are not using even a proper hashing they're just using CRC and claiming that's encryption they're claiming that that is the way you can protect the votes so very poor systems and I have to say that what if I would be if somebody would be trying to explain me what I have seen with my own eyes I wouldn't believe it this is so unbelievably bad from some from time to time again Air capit Design so speak uh I had a wonderful thing I was sent by Secretary of State to inspect one system and that was one of the states where you have a a two of everything Republican key and Democratic key in every door

there's two people on on for everything and I came there and they said I don't understand why you Secretary of State sent you all we are completely unhackable all our systems are air capap we only use Wi-Fi and I started laughing because I thought it was a brilliant delivery of joke and when I started laughing they were looking me if I have two two heads and three hands and I realized oh that's what you think air gapping is so interestingly if I start asking well who told you air gapping is WiFi and so the vendor told us great great so this is a reality in in in that environment the same thing about Wenders uh when we're filming the movie

uh we were in a live election situation and one of the voting machines which were front of I saw the secy seals were broken so I took the election officials next to the and we were filming and I was waiting for them to see that the secuity seals are broken nothing happens then I point like hey the seals are broken oh don't worry about it we stopped sealing those 10 years ago because they were breaking all the time and you know we had and the vendor say it's completely safe so we stopped sealing these machines live USB ports live internet ports everything underneath those those uh base which you were supposed to be sealing and I asked him well can you

show me that the vendor has been actually telling you that and they did they showed that the vendor have said no you don't need to seal this this is unnecessary be sealed it's completely safe this way just unnecessary hassle so again when we talk about penetration testing and how penetration Tes is important the so the way the vendors have been explaining this is to say well if you do something like voting Village and you are hacking something you cannot do it in election election setting because of physical security and at the same time they're telling and they put unmeasurable burden to the physical security and at the same time they tell well we don't need to do the physical

security because everything is so secure in US its common practice is sleepover the voting machines are given to the pole workers up to two weeks before the election date to bring home they are in their garages and they bring it them the polling place on the morning even worse they are shipped to the churches and schools week before the election they're just in a hallway everybody students everybody can access those and it is quite a funny how the physical security can be bad now it's not only the voting machines the law says that the ballots have to be preserved under lock and key and this is the one swing States uh election officials idea what lock and key

means this whole place was in a garage behind me were Fourth of July decorations on my left side was the garage uh The Gardener equipment so it was a humongous place where they can open the doors and people were coming in and out these are actually the ballots of 2020 election and the primary election were in another dumpster thing on the side so again while the law is very clear saying under lock and key how the election officials interpret that is something else in this place this is a very much a a trump land Place 80% of the votes went to Trump but the problem is that then they can say well we can certify our

result this actually happened in Coffee County Georgia they claim we cannot certify our own results so we try to throw all the votes out because we are ourselves failing so first they say we don't need to be careful because we know how this count is going to go anyway and then after that say oh now we don't know maybe it was 81% maybe it should have be 82% so the physical security is Paramount importance it's negligent in in large part of us especially in rural area and it is fueling the possible claims of hacking again the vendors are very much the source of bad practices this is a ivotronic it's very much still in Ed system a little bit

outdated and when you go to web you can find all the passwords which by the way cannot be changed they are a hardwired passwords but again override password ESS ESS ESS is the name of the company so that's that's how override but it gets worse this is another vendor and they are explaining carefully that the regulation requires you to rotate your password so alternate between those two passwords and here add one number and write it down so that we know the the sad part of this is that the manual exp the manual reveals that the vendor knows why the password has to be changed and vendor themselves are instructing the counties to circumvent the intention

of the regulation would you buy a national security system from is staki website the answer is of course that's why it is existing so let's zoom in our election coding Services signs your time and effort so the most critical part of the whole election programming the voting machine elections you can Outsource from this tacky website and this actual website is from the company which is serving for five states and significant amount of of Swing Waters all right well that's a good start so let's see what else we can find from this one wonderful website oh they sell physical security stuff too great what we have here oh we have the state of Michigan paper seal the seal

which is protecting the votes well it's for it is the stack of that is $4 and a half dollars I'm absolutely certain if out of state from New York I would send my personal credit card there they will definitely not sip it two years they do so you don't need to counterfeit the seals you can just go and buy them again the same place well what we have here we have the cont Central administrator card we have supervisor card about $10 what could possibly go wrong it's absolutely necessary that you can buy them from web web uh store and actually we created a card ourselves which is as as a demonstration a vote which give a card which gives you

unlimited number of votes so it resets itself automatically again I said they ship it we did a try there was about 30 companies in the space and most of the companies didn't ask any questions where we called one company says can you send us a letterhead and that was the proof that we are you know doing the right thing this whole thing has been flaged and I have been making sure this is known trying to get any kind of regulation in place nothing has happened in 10 years the biggest problem in this area is that these companies have no regulation they are in a strip malls in a shopping centers uh no physical security whatsoever their website is

listing all their employees they have their personal stories about their cats all the words you need it's a social engine nearing Heaven if you want to use it and even the ownership who is owning these companies they don't need to close so some notable election related campaigns and hacking campaigns happens all the time Estonia Georgia Belgium Ukraine of course was very well documented because happened T France us these hacks happen all the time and these are the hacks we know about these are the hacks we have got in out in the wild and have been able to either neutralize the hack or at least mitigate and correct in in a case for example in Ukraine 2014 the the for results were

published but after publication uh they were able to redact that and get because Real Results were known election right resulting is a bigger and bigger problem cesa so in Department of Homeland Security uh their cyber security infrastructure cyber and infrastructure security agent gency has been publishing instructions for the counties how to counteract and how to mitigate the election night reporting problems again election KN Pro the biggest Pro part of election KN reporting is in the heads of the election officials it's meaningless they think this is a intermediate results they are not official results we don't care about security of that of course the media and the general public don't understand that so when you have a

situation like wrong results in Ghana the consequences are riots and loss of life full stop they don't understand on the streets and they are not informed that these are so this car they're so overlooked area of security in in election because they are not legally binding nobody really cares about it but this is a from the public perspective a massive problem and it's a loow hanging fruit because this systems have very little security at or security at all and they are not considered important even when they are the only way where the general public can learn the results with confidence and if you all of a sudden have different results in the evening and the morning like what

happened 2019 in Jakarta you have burning City that's the hard reality again when you look the different ways of attack this is a really an area where you have can use all the same techniques as any spam agency uh spam spam email caign is using an easy low hanging fruit to attack and these attacks happen all the time and also false claims of attack happen all the time because if you look uh pgp attacks and if you look how the um anti-spoofing and anti antios attacks attack prevention works you it's very hard to detect or convince yourself is this a pgp attack or is the system working as intended to be protecting D attacks and this caused a massive amount

of misinformation disinformation in the last election with the claims that us votes were sended to Germany and counted in secret in Germany uh that actually part of that whole problem was contradiction was result of how Cloud flare works so if you were in the US looking where the vote server is it says it's Germany if you look in Germany it say outside of London if you look in London it says vultur outside of Washington DC round robin but this was never communicated effectively before election and after election when the conspiracy theories started to go wild we were in a situation where that can can couldn't have been any more taken back some of the elections how the Happ the

election hacking happens I don't know if you knew about this where election uh in Ukraine 2014 the funny part of this was that the Russian television was broadcasting the same fraudulent results which were found in the server before the the official results were released so at least it became clear and there was no possible deniability who were the attackers because how how they could have known the fraud results hacked into again once the Real Results were discovered and put in the the significant change happened but a good example of a very successful attack because even when in Ukraine uh the they understood that this was election result hack the same fraudulent results were published in

Russia and they were never uh making the same correction it was hack instead of the information in that side was to say oh this shows that the wrong the pro Russian candidate was election was stolen from the pro Russian candidate Ghana the same thing it's very sad that the when the all government's only different only possible way to try to communicate that the results are fraudulent is to use Twitter and now when Twitter is as bad as it is really there's no unified way of communicating the officials to communicate back to the general public if something goes wrong and this is a problem be CES a when we did a uh hacking contest in Defcon and that's our

sister Village uh she was 11 years old and it took 9 minutes when she uh when she hacked the elction Knight Reporting System mockup we had and again there was a immediate claim that oh we had preh Haack the system because not not really anyone would have a a real system with a a a trivial vulnerability and then when you go to Miller report uh it reveals that Gru was using that same attack out in the wild the same attack which Bianca Lis had been demonstrating earlier in the voting Village and and in is so again the systems because the electron reporting systems are not considered security sensitive such a trivial thing that checking that you don't have a SQL

inject capability that's not done another good example South County Wisconsin these results were out for a long time and if you see the result you see something very weird so this this error was not corrected for almost a month so you see that the results you have more votes reported than the ballots cast obviously impossible results and you would think that in order to have the general public confidence you would absolutely want to correct this as quickly as possible it was not done the same was in three top races so it was not only President it was also the Congress seat and and Senate and the actual explanation was oh meming in didn't work so that's why we entered the

results manually once we didn't think it worked and modem and putting it twice again what means moding in results that means FTP that's FTP over internet but we have to remember if you there's two firewalls it's not internet I'm sorry this it's that's why I want try to make a humor because this is so sad that unless you can make a humor out of it it's it's not going to work so I L lot of Home BR systems lot of Legacy systems just no possible way of securing and again USB sticks this is a real explanation how in one place the system works you have an old PC which hasn't been patched end of live windows

and you're carrying USB sticks between the systems from internet system buck and path to the air gap system and this all because they didn't have a they had didn't have the program they uh used for scraping the PDF file uh in working in the in the newer Windows version so that's why they use this horrible thing we were talking about the uh uh HDM problems in in yesterday but this is another example the vendors vendor uh recommends to have an HDR I pulled out of the uh secure server to a public area where everybody can go and of course HDMI can carry internet and these examples just go on and on and on so we are in a system where we have the

reporting problem we have the voter registration problem all of these systems are vulnerable and there's no possible way of getting this corrected unless there is a regulation and at this point of time there is no regulation in in the United States elections are run by the states not by the federal government and every state can have their own laws and done everything on their own way so this is just a multiple slides explaining how broken is the way how the the are are transmitted again when you look the US map this looks pretty much Republican wins and this is a mindset what a lot of people have when they look these Maps if you look the jurisdictions this is the

jurisdiction where the ballot size is telling how what is the population it looks very different so when you look the number of counties which is 3,000 a round number 3,000 counties and round number Biden W five 00 and won the whole election it is because the counties which are the large cities those are where the population lives and land doesn't vote so you have a great disparity you have the cities where you have a better security and you have the rural area where they don't care about security that much and this is the part of the problem why trying to secure the system is so hard because people who are in the smaller places don't want to have the

burden the security will bring every state have a different law very interesting law from time to time and also there are two kinds of States bottom up and up down in the top down state the Secretary State who is officially the elections Chief has a a um control over the election in a bottom up is the the local counties are making all the decisions including the purchasing decisions and there are states where the County laws are superseding the uh state laws again the the unmitigated trisma disinformation which I mentioned before this was the the the great uh lie that uh the vot US votes are counted overseas in Germany there was even a claim that

there was a a gunfight when a loyal Patriots went to Germany and had a suit out to get the servers back and the law Li actually continues by claiming that in the uh the uh T the bomb in Nashville Tennessee which went over Christmas was intent to destroy the service which had been now in security uh secure location in AT&T building so this all started just because nobody communicated how the system works and how the election results are protected and how the reporting system is protected the other part is granularity the conspir theor always mention these two pictures you have first results where it's 1,690 and then all of a sudden 20,000 votes disappear claim this is the

evidence of a massive fraud the problem here is that you don't understand how the elections work so first of all in us it's common that patches the uh the law says that the uh vot the ballots have to be put in arbitary patches of 100 votes and the batch the votes have to stay together so when there is a a writing there is a any kind of action which needs a human all the votes are H back until one of the ballots is manually inspected and as a result for example in Georgia a 5,800 ballots were holding over 20,000 votes back and as result when the human processing happens this is the conspiracy theories favorite

picture all of a sudden the votes jump well that's because the votes are coming from same area which is same demographic and as a result all of a sudden everything jumps but that's not this is has happened every election before this is the only time when this is uh have been put in in the frame and also these are the two pictures which cons theories use the other states where the thing happened for Trump being winning they don't share these pictures so this jumping and so-called dumps that happens on both directions and if you look this whole system in in System point of view this is showing that when you look the votes from the system there is no jump

It's Only in a reporting so this is telling how the vote how the underlooked property of of reporting is the uh crate s of of this information I'm going to be skipping a little bit of slides because I want to just go to uh I'm talking here about the Wi-Fi how the actual hacks can be carried out and I'm just going to go straight to the place where uh these are literally telling how the actual hacks and what kind of tools and how simple and cheap are the are the system by the way using barcodes what a wonderful idea I don't know here in UK but in the US people love to have fake driving license

to buy beer and the same fake driving license is used to register yourself to the vote and it's a USB device which is can be reprogrammed through un trusted Channel called barcode what could possibly go wrong absolutely nothing uh I just want to jump to the last part which is what happens in Estonia so Estonia claims they can do internet voting and they are publishing the source code and they publishing the videos how they prove their people that the elction is fair so first of all this has this is the actual code used when they claim that they have never been corrupted ballot this is the actual code they used in seven elections I think and

when we revealed this they obviously fixed it they remote the comments so still today they are running the whole system with no Integrity check at all also they're claiming that when the clients of is signed they publish the videos and if you look that video well let's take take a look this is the signing of the code in computer which has never been connected to Internet so that's why it have a torrent and it had pirated movies and it has a poker stars it's clear evidence that this connect is never connected to Internet anyway just the last word is blockchain very bad idea it always comes back blockchain every blockchain voting system which has been presented has been

hacked and it's unmitigated disaster so blockchain don't even think about it it's a one way of getting a yourself in a deep trouble anyway uh that's our Estonian hack uh there's a website where we explain how to do it and I think that's it

thank you Harry if we have any questions quickly I'm going to ask a leading question to start off with what do you think about the UK's paper based system versus some of the electronic systems that are available and just so you guys know um the London electoral um London elections were um wanting to be these machines that we're talking about here so what do you think we have a long history of fraud on paper 4,000 years we can mitigate paper because you cannot do wholesale if you go a paper a bowling location with a paper ballot there are boxes and boxes tens of thousands of kilos of those ballots and there you cannot perform a wholesale

attack but most importantly the voter has recorded their voters intent on a permanent media paper which means if you have a questions you can always recount and there is methodological risk limiting audit developed by Professor Phil Stark mus Berkeley which is a statistical methodology with a very low workload to go back to the paper take a random sample and prove yourself whether the result is right or wrong so we have a methodology to use the paper to convince public and yourself that the V the election not that the election has the last moment vote the right result but the outcome hasn't been changed so the right candidate one great yeah that'll be [Music] yeah are there are there decent quality

voting systems available uh if if legislation's changed to make that requirement so unfortunately unfortunately there is no good voting system yet in the market there are now initiatives first time ever to develop open- Source systems where you are building in the idea that the system cannot be trusted so it's facilitating easier human process to verify this is really never trust always verify system those systems are now in infancy I have great hope that in next 10 years we have such paper ballot systems coming in the market but today there's not a single system I could recommend and say this is a system which is significantly better than the other systems and by the way I have been

building two companies myself both time I left because the company decided that they want to do is more commercial oriented than security oriented and that's why I didn't want to have my name attached to that and last question brilliant um thank you fantastic talk um and very much with you on the paper ballots idea as well um one thing that I think is quite fascinating about this is obviously the the kind of the proponent of the voting systems a dodgy argument at the moment is very much sort the Trump side and for reasons that I won't even go into obviously he's not a particularly flavor of the month at the moment it's certainly an in our

media kind of thing do you think that these companies are taking advantage of being able to go the whole thing is a conspiracy theory rather than there's some spous claims but the system has General Security faults do you think that this is kind of because nothing really seems to be being improved whilst it's just wrapped up as a conspiracy so so when uh I started with a couple of friends voting Village we were called out by politicians saying we are irresponsible people because we let foreign adversaries to access voting systems and I say absolutely I agree with you guys because the foreign people are American citizens none of the voting major vendor systems are made in US

dominan main code base comes from Serbia the Predator main code base comes from Canada there's no US based system and while some of the systems have features which are very very hard to find what is the legal use for those and they have a very much sloppiness I don't see a deliberate I don't see a smoking G gun if you may as I said most of the systems are just so old designed that they were designed when cyber security was science fiction cyber warfare was science fiction so there just very bad systems by Design great let's have another round of applause for Harry great