Portland computer science research and development firm Galois is taking aim at election security with its latest spin-off, Free & Fair. The new wholly-owned subsidiary is run by elections security researcher Joseph Kiniry, who two years ago illustrated how easy it is to hack vote-by-email systems, and is based on technology developed by Galois. To start, Free & Fair has three products:
- A tabulator, which is a secure and verifiable ballot scanning system.
- The ePollbook, which is a scalable and secure electronic poll book for precincts and county voting centers.
- A supervised voting system, which is a complete polling place system based on the STAR-Vote project. That project is a collaboration between academia and Travis County (Austin), Texas to create a secure, reliable and auditable voting system.
“Most U.S. jurisdictions today use election technology developed in the 1990s, and the typical voting system is running an operating system that is no longer vendor-supported, does not have security patches regularly applied and relies on outdated technology,” said Kiniry, in a written statement. “By developing high assurance, open source software and services whose security and architecture are reviewed by the world’s foremost experts in academia and industry, Free & Fair is ready to help election officials take back control of their election systems.”
Full Article: Portland tech firm Galois spins out new company to make elections more secure – Portland Business Journal.