National: Ex-CIA chief worries campaigns falling short on cybersecurity | Maggie Miller/The Hill
Democratic 2020 presidential campaigns say they are working to boost their cybersecurity, but experts worry those efforts may not be enough. Former acting CIA Director Michael Morell told The Hill he worries there is a “void” and that campaigns need outside help to fully address the issue. “There is not a lot of initial thought given to cybersecurity,” Morell said about the campaigns. Several campaigns insist they have prioritized the issue. Chris Meagher, the spokesman for South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s campaign, told The Hill that “our campaign is committed to digital security,” noting the hiring of a full-time chief information security officer (CISO), Mick Baccio, last week. “Hiring a full-time CISO is one way we are protecting against cyberattacks,” Meagher added. A spokesperson for the presidential campaign of former Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-Texas) told The Hill they are “actively engaged in defending our operation from disinformation and other cyberattacks.” The spokesperson emphasized that “whether it's training staff as a part of our onboarding process, requiring staff to use complex passwords to protect mobile devices, or using secure messaging services, this campaign understands that protecting our information requires a comprehensive approach to prepare for and manage attacks."National: At Def Con, hackers and lawmakers came together to tackle holes in election security | Taylor Telford/The Washington Post
As Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) toured the Voting Village on Friday at Def Con, the world’s hacker conference extraordinaire, a roomful of hackers applied their skills to voting equipment in an enthusiastic effort to comply with the instructions they had been given: “Please break things.” Armed with lock-pick kits to crack into locked hardware, Ethernet cables and inquiring minds, they had come for a rare chance to interrogate the machines that conduct U.S. democracy. By laying siege to electronic poll books and ballot printers, the friendly hackers aimed to expose weaknesses that could be exploited by less friendly hands looking to interfere in elections. Wyden nodded along as Harri Hursti, the founder of Nordic Innovation Labs and one of the event’s organizers, explained that the almost all of the machines in the room were still used in elections across the United States, despite having well-known vulnerabilities that have been more or less ignored by the companies that sell them. Many had Internet connections, Hursti said, a weakness savvy attackers could abuse in several ways. Wyden shook his head in disbelief. “We need paper ballots, guys," Wyden said. After Wyden walked away, a few hackers exchanged confused expressions before figuring out who he was. “I wasn’t expecting to see any senators here,” one said with a laugh.National: Voting machine companies balk at taking part in hacking event | Kevin Collier/CNN
At the country's biggest election security bonanza, the US government is happy to let hackers try to break into its equipment. The private companies that make the machines America votes on, not so much. The Def Con Voting Village, a now-annual event at the US's largest hacking conference, gives hackers free rein to try to break into a wide variety of decommissioned election equipment, some of which is still in use today. As in the previous two years, they found a host of new flaws. The hunt for vulnerabilities in US election systems has underscored tensions between the Voting Village organizers, who argue that it's a valuable exercise, and the manufacturers of voting equipment, who didn't have a formal presence at the convention. Supporters of the Voting Village say it's the best way draw attention to problems with an industry that otherwise doesn't face much public accountability, even in the wake of Russia's foreign interference in the 2016 election. Their work has attracted the notice of several lawmakers, who are calling for new legislation to strengthen the integrity of US elections.National: DEF CON Voting Village: It’s About ‘Risk’ | Kelly Jackson Higgins/Dark Reading
DHS, security experts worry about nation-state or other actors waging a disruptive or other attack on the 2020 election to sow distrust of the election process. When DEF CON debuted its first-ever Voting Village in 2017, it took just minutes for researcher Carsten Schürmann to crack into a decommissioned WinVote voting system machine via WiFi and take control of the machine such that he could run malware, change votes in the database, or even shut down the machine remotely. Several other researchers were able to break into other voting machines and equipment by pulling apart the guts and finding flaws by hand that year, and then again on other machines in the 2018 event. The novelty of the live hacking of decommissioned voting machines has worn off a bit now and there weren't many surprises - nor did the organizers expect many - at this year's Voting Village, held at DEF CON in Las Vegas last week. But once again the event shone a white hot light on blatant security weaknesses in decommissioned voting machine equipment and systems. "DEF CON is not about proving that voting machines can be hacked. They all can be hacked and 30 years from now, those can be hacked, too. It's about making sure we understand the risk," Harri Hursti, Nordic Innovation Labs, one of the founders of the Voting Village, told attendees last week. Hursti as well as other security experts, government officials, and hackers at this year's event doubled down on how best to secure the 2020 US presidential election: ensuring there's an audit trail with paper ballots; employing so-called risk-limiting audits (manually checking paper ballots with electronic machine results); and proper security hygiene in voting equipment, systems, and applications.National: Democrats stump for election security, blast McConnell at hacker conference | Eric Geller/Politico
Democratic lawmakers emerged from the world’s largest hacker conference this weekend with a clear message: Congress must pass legislation to mandate better U.S. election security. In panels and interviews at DEF CON in Las Vegas, where a roomful of hackers demonstrated ways to breach insecure voting machines, those lawmakers focused their fury on the man proudly blocking their bills. “Why hasn’t Congress fixed the problem? Two words: Mitch McConnell,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said during a Friday keynote address to a packed and largely supportive room at DEF CON’s Voting Village. Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), one of a handful of computer scientists in Congress, told POLITICO that when it came to his biggest election security concern, “I have two words: Mitch McConnell.” The Senate majority leader has repeatedly blocked votes in the upper chamber on two House Democratic bills that would require voting machines to produce paper records, mandate post-election audits and impose security requirements on election technology companies.National: Here’s the political bind Democrats face when talking about election security | Joseph Marks/The Washington Post
Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) applauded the crowd of cybersecurity researchers uncovering dangerous bugs in voting machines and other election systems at a security conference here -- but he's in a bind about how to talk about election security with constituents. Swalwell, who recently ended a long-shot presidential bid, believes chances are almost nil that Republicans will join Democrats to pass legislation mandating fixes to improve election security before the 2020 contest. By continuing to bang the drum about potential security weaknesses, he worries Democrats risk inadvertently convincing citizens that the election is bound to be hacked — and that there's no point in voting. “If we tell voters the ballot box is not secure and that we have all these vulnerabilities … if we say that over and over and over, is the result of that suppressing [the vote]?” Swalwell asked a room of researchers this weekend at the Def Con cybersecurity conference's Voting Village, which focuses exclusively on the security of election systems. This is a predicament that will only get harder for many Democrats who are coming to grips with the idea that they may have run out of time to require states to shift to paper ballots, post-election audits and other cybersecurity best practices before the 2020 contest. Swalwell believes these fixes will happen only if there’s a Democratic president and Congress in 2021 or later -- even as intelligence officials warn the 2020 election is a major target for Russia and other adversaries looking to undermine the American political system.National: Voting Machine Security: Where We Stand Six Months Before the New Hampshire Primary | Brennan Center for Justice
In late July, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released its report on the Russian government’s attacks on America’s election infrastructure. While the report offered dozens of recommendations related to vast and varied election systems in the United States (from voter registration databases to election night reporting), it pointedly noted that there was an urgent need to secure the nation’s voting systems in particular. Among the two most important recommendations made were that states should (1) replace outdated and vulnerable voting systems with “at minimum… a voter-verified paper trail,” and adopt statistically sound audits. These recommendations are not new and have been consistently made by experts since long before the 2016 election. Last year, Congress provided $380 million to states to help with upgrades, but it wasn’t enough. This analysis, six months ahead of the first primary for 2020, examines the significant progress we’ve made in these two areas since 2016, and it catalogs the important and necessary work that is left to be done.National: Why paper is considered state-of-the-art voting technology | Karan Gambhir and Jack Karsten/Brookings
On June 27, the House passed a bill that would bolster America’s high-tech voting infrastructure with a low-tech fix: paper. Introduced by Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA-19), the SAFE Act requires that all voting machines involve “the use of an individual, durable, voter-verified paper ballot of the voter’s vote.” While the inclusion of paper ballots may seem like a technological step backward, the SAFE Act’s affinity for paper is not a quirk. Election security experts from Harvard, Stanford and the Brennan Center for Justice all recommend the phasing out of paperless voting, and twelve of the thirteen Democratic candidates who have declared a position on election security support mandating the use of paper ballots. Yet despite expert consensus, political activism, and availability of funding, opposition in the Republican-controlled Senate makes it unlikely that the SAFE Act or any paper ballot standard will be implemented by 2020. With no method to verify votes in the case of software or hardware failure, paperless voting machines represent a large vulnerability. Failure to act on election security risks not only a loss of trust in the next election, but in the democratic process as a whole.National: Senate Intelligence Committee report shows how electronic voting systems are inherently vulnerable to hackers. Fred Kaplan/Slate
Just hours after Senate Republicans blocked a vote on a bill to make elections less vulnerable to cyberattacks, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a 67-page report, concluding that, leading up to the 2016 election, Russians hacked voting machines and registration rolls in all 50 states, and they are likely still doing so. The heavily redacted document, based on a two-year investigation, found no evidence that the hackers altered votes or vote tallies, though it says they could have if they’d wanted to. However, three former senior U.S. intelligence officials with backgrounds in cybersecurity told me that the absence of evidence isn’t the same as the evidence of an absence. One of them said, “I doubt very much that any changes would be detectable. Certainly, the hackers would be able to cover any tracks. The Russians aren’t stupid.” Hacking individual voting machines would be an inefficient way to throw an election. But J. Alex Halderman, a computer scientist who has tested vulnerabilities for more than a decade, testified to the Senate committee that he and his team “created attacks that can spread from machine to machine, like a computer virus, and silently change election outcomes.” They studied touch-screen and optical-scan systems, and “in every single case,” he said, “we found ways for attackers to sabotage machines and steal votes.” Another way to throw an election might be to attack systems that manage voter-registration lists, which the hackers also did in some states. Remove people from the lists—focusing on areas dominated by members of the party that the hacker wants to lose—and they won’t be able to vote.National: Vulnerability Scanning and Tools for Election Security Description Vulnerability | Phil Goldstein/StateTech Magazine
With 2020 political campaigns in full swing, the conversion of election security has again come to the fore. How can state and county election officials help secure their voting systems ahead of the 2020 elections? Vulnerability scanning is a good place to start. Such scans are a Software as a Service function that helps discover weaknesses and allow for both authenticated and unauthenticated scans. In June, perennial swing state Florida announced a $5.1 million investment into election cybersecurity following disclosures in May that two counties in the state fell victim to a spear phishing attack by Russian hackers in 2016. How dangerous is the election security threat landscape? It’s complicated and it covers everything from outdated voting machines that may be vulnerable to hacking to the networks used to process and transfer voting totals and voter registration rolls. Vulnerability scans and assessments of election infrastructure are critical, because “from a cyber perspective, every part of the election process that involves some type of electronic device or software is vulnerable to exploitation or disruption,” as a 2018 Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs report notes.National: US still ‘not prepared’ in event of a serious cyber attack and Congress can’t help if it happens | Iain Thomson/The Register
Despite some progress, the US is still massively underprepared for a serious cyber attack and the current administration isn't helping matters, according to politicians visiting the DEF CON hacking conference. In an opening keynote, representatives Ted Lieu (D-CA) and James Langevin (D-IL) were joined by hackers Cris Thomas, aka Space Rogue, and Jen Ellis (Infosecjen) to discuss the current state of play in government preparedness. "No, we are not prepared," said Lieu, one of only four trained computer scientists in Congress. "When a crisis hits, it's too late for Congress to act. We are very weak on a federal level, nearly 20 years after Space Rogue warned us we're still there." Thomas testified before Congress 20 years ago about the dangers that the internet could pose if proper steps weren't taken. At today's conference he said there was much still to be done but that he was cautiously optimistic for the future, as long as hackers put aside their issues with legislators and worked with them. "As hackers we want things done now," he said. "But Congress doesn't work that way; it doesn't work at the 'speed of hack'. If you're going to engage with it, you need to recognise this is an incremental journey and try not to be so absolutist."National: Schumer calls for $1 billion national investment in election security | David Lombardo/Times Union
Election cybersecurity has the potential to be a growth industry as federal lawmakers push a $1 billion investment in safeguarding next year's elections. The proposed spending was highlighted Monday by U.S. Sen. Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., who stopped in East Greenbush for a tour of the Center for Internet Security, which helps government agencies prevent hacking of elections. The non-profit company also worked with the presidential campaigns of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton to buttress their systems from cyber attacks in 2016. The money for cybersecurity grants is part of legislation that would also require states to collect paper ballots, set minimum cybersecurity standards, direct federal officials to craft preventative measures states can implement, and impose testing of voting system vulnerabilities. Paper ballots are already used as a safeguard for New York elections. The U.S. Constitution empowers states to administer elections, which has resulted in varying standards across the country.National: Analysis shows 2020 votes still vulnerable to hacking | Mary Clare Jalonick/Associated Press
More than one in 10 voters could cast ballots on paperless voting machines in the 2020 general election, according to a new analysis, leaving their ballots more vulnerable to hacking. A study released by the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law on Tuesday evaluates the state of the country's election security six months before the New Hampshire primary and concludes that much more needs to be done. While there has been significant progress by states and the federal government since Russian agents targeted U.S. state election systems ahead of the 2016 presidential election, the analysis notes that many states have not taken all of the steps needed to ensure that doesn't happen again. The report also notes that around a third of all local election jurisdictions were using voting machines that are at least a decade old, despite recommendations they be replaced after 10 years. The Associated Press reported last month that many election systems are running on old Windows 7 software that will soon be outdated. "We should replace antiquated equipment, and paperless equipment in particular, as soon as possible," the report recommends.National: Hackers Take on Darpa’s $10 Million Voting Machine | Lily Hay Newman/WIRED
For the last two years, hackers have come to the Voting Village at the DefCon security conference in Las Vegas to tear down voting machines and analyze them for vulnerabilities. But this year’s Village features a fancy new target: a prototype secure voting machine created through a $10 million project at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. You know it better as Darpa, the government's mad science wing. Announced in March, the initiative aims to develop an open source voting platform built on secure hardware. The Oregon-based verifiable systems firm Galois is designing the voting system. And Darpa wants you to know: its endgame goes way beyond securing the vote. The agency hopes to use voting machines as a model system for developing a secure hardware platform—meaning that the group is designing all the chips that go into a computer from the ground up, and isn’t using proprietary components from companies like Intel or AMD. “The goal of the program is to develop these tools to provide security against hardware vulnerabilities,” says Linton Salmon, the project’s program manager at Darpa. “Our goal is to protect against remote attacks.” Other voting machines in the Village are complete, deployed products that attendees can take apart and analyze. But the Darpa machines are prototypes, currently running on virtualized versions of the hardware platforms they will eventually use. A basic user interface is currently being provided by the secure voting firm VotingWorks.National: Mayberry v. Moscow: How Local Officials Are Preparing to Defend the 2020 Elections | AJ Vicens/Mother Jones
In early June, the Allegheny County Board of Elections held a special meeting in downtown Pittsburgh, inviting a trio of election security experts to offer advice as the county selects new voting equipment. Marian Schneider, a former Pennsylvania state elections official and the current president of Verified Voting, an election security watchdog group, gave an opening statement framing the day’s conversation in stark terms. “Twenty sixteen demonstrated what many of us have long believed…the threat to our computerized voting system was not merely theoretical, but real and persistent,” she warned, reiterating that another nation had “conducted a well-orchestrated attack on American democracy.” The members of the board solemnly listened, took copious notes, and thanked the panel for their expertise as they assessed bids offering new and more secure equipment. After the meeting, Candice Hoke, a longtime election administration and security expert who’d also been invited to speak, described the gathering as an unusual bright spot, contrasting the attention Allegheny County had devoted to the issue to many places around the country where the state of election security lags. Efforts by federal agencies to work with states and jurisdictions to improve election security are helping, Hoke says, but the bureaucrats overseeing the country’s more than 10,000 election jurisdictions are still routinely outmatched.National: Are States Taking Cybersecurity Seriously Enough? | Katherine Barrett & Richard Greene/Governing
A spike in cyberattacks in recent months has left state and local governments reeling. Baltimore faces more than $18 million in losses following a May ransomware attack. Several Florida cities were hit in June. And Los Angeles police data was hacked in late July. A 2018 report from the National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO) found one unidentified state undergoing 300 million attacks a day -- up from 150 million two years before. Cybersecurity and risk management is at the top of CIOs' list of 10 priorities for 2019, according to an annual NASCIO survey. Rhode Island was making it the biggest priority. In 2017, it became one of only two states with a cabinet-level cybersecurity position. (The other is Idaho, according to Meredith Ward, NASCIO's director of policy and research.) But this pioneering approach wasn’t long-lived in Rhode Island. Last month, the position was removed from the state’s 2020 budget. High-level officials in the state, including its CIO, are confident that cybersecurity will continue to be a priority, but others worry it will receive less attention.National: Senator: Status quo on voting machine security is a ‘danger to our democracy’ | Alfred Ng/CNET
In the aftermath of the 2016 US presidential election, lawmakers have seen little change in security for voters. But if voting machine security standards don't change by the 2020 presidential election, Sen. Ron Wyden warns, the consequences could be far worse than the cyberattacks of 2016. The Democrat from Oregon, who is a member of the Senate Intelligence committee, told the Defcon hacking conference that US voting infrastructure is failing to keep elections secure from potential cyberattacks. He made the comments in a Friday speech at the Voting Village, a special section of the Las Vegas conference dedicated to election security. "If nothing happens, the kind of interference we will see form hostile foreign actors will make 2016 look like child's play," Wyden said. "We're just not prepared, not even close, to stop it." Election security has been a major concern for lawmakers since the 2016 election, which saw unprecedented interference by the Russians. Though no votes are believed to have been changed, the Russians targeted election systems in all 50 states, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee. Legislation to protect elections has been trudged along in Congress. Multiple members of Congress were at Defcon to discuss the issue, as well as to learn about cybersecurity policy.National: DARPA’s $10 million voting machine couldn’t be hacked at Defcon (for the wrong reasons) | Alfred Ng/CNET
For the majority of Defcon, hackers couldn't crack the $10 million secure voting machine prototypes that DARPA had set up at the Voting Village. But it wasn't because of the machine's security features that the team had been working on for four months. The reason: technical difficulties during the machines' setup. Eager hackers couldn't find vulnerabilities in the DARPA-funded project during the security conference in Las Vegas because a bug in the machines didn't allow hackers to access their systems over the first two days. (DARPA is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.) Galois brought five machines, and each one had difficulties during the setup, said Joe Kiniry, a principal research scientist at the government contractor. "They seemed to have had a myriad of different kinds of problems," the Voting Village's co-founder Harri Hursti said. "Unfortunately, when you're pushing the envelope on technology, these kinds of things happen." It wasn't until the Voting Village opened on Sunday morning that hackers could finally get a chance to look for vulnerabilities on the machine. Kiniry said his team was able to solve the problem on three of them and was working to fix the last two before Defcon ended.National: Why blockchain-based voting could threaten democracy | Lucas Mearian/Computerworld
Public tests of blockchain-based mobile voting are growing.
Even as there’s been an uptick in pilot projects, security experts warn that blockchain-based mobile voting technology is innately insecure and potentially a danger to democracy through “wholesale fraud” or “manipulation tactics.”
The topic of election security has been in the spotlight recently after Congress held classified briefings on U.S. cyber infrastructure to identify and defend against threats to the election system, especially after Russian interference was uncovered in the 2016 Presidential election.
Thirty-two states permit various kinds of online voting – such as via email – for some subset of voters. In the 2016 general election, more 100,000 ballots were cast online, according to data collected by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. The actual number is likely much higher, according to some experts.
One method of enabling online voting has been to use applications based on blockchain, the peer-to-peer technology that employs encryption and a write-once, append-many electronic ledger to allow private and secure registration information and ballots to be transmitted over the internet. Over the past two years, West Virginia, Denver and Utah County, Utah have all used blockchain-based mobile apps to allow military members and their families living overseas to cast absentee ballots using an iPhone.
Mike Queen, deputy chief of staff for West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner, said that while the state currently has no plans to expand the use of the mobile voting beyond military absentee voters, his office did “a ton of due diligence” on the technology before and after using it.
“Not only does blockchain make it secure, but [the blockchain-based mobile app] has a really unique biometric safeguard system in place as well as facial recognition and thumb prints,” Queen said via email after 2018 General Election.
Security experts disagree. The issues around online voting include server penetration attacks, client-device malware, denial-of-service (DoS) attacks and other disruptions, all associated with infecting voters’ computers with malware or infecting the computers in the elections office that handle and count ballots.
“If I were running for office and they decided to use blockchain for that election, I’d be scared,” said Jeremy Epstein, vice chairman of the Association for Computing Machinery’s U.S. Technology Policy Committee.
Epstein co-authored an election security report with Common Cause, the National Election Defense Council, and the R Street Institute, “Email and Internet Voting: The Overlooked Threat to Election Security.” In it, he criticized blockchain and internet voting as a ready target for online attacks by foreign intelligence and said transmission of ballots over the internet, including by email, fax and blockchain systems, are seriously vulnerable.
“Military voters undoubtedly face greater obstacles in casting their ballots. They deserve any help the government can give them to participate in democracy equally with all other citizens,” Epstein wrote. “However, in this threat-filled environment, online voting endangers the very democracy the U.S. military is charged with protecting.”
There are many reasons blockchain is not good for voting, Epstein said. For one, it assumes there’s no malware in the voter’s computer.