The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is working on a highly security open source Hack-Proof Voting system. The project costs around $10 million.
The new system will prevent hackers to hack the voting machine and allow voters to verify that their votes were recorded correctly.
The Hackproof voting system is designed by Galois, its an Oregon-based company working with the government too, experienced in designing a secure system. The system will use a fully open source voting system, instead of closed, there is no other third party can examine the voting machine.
Linton Salmon, program manager in DARPA’s Microsystems Technology Office told to Motherboard,
“We will not have a voting system that we can deploy. That’s not what we do,” said Salmon. “We will show a methodology that could be used by others to build a voting system that is completely secure.”
We wanted something where there could be a lot of people who could look at this in an open way and critique it and find problems,” said Salmon.
Currently, DARPA program focusing to develop secure hardware program. This new voting machine work without barcodes.
Joe Kiniry, the principal scientist at Galois who is leading the project at his company.
Many current ballot-marking systems on the market today have been criticized by security professionals because they print bar codes on the ballot that the scanner can read instead of the human-readable portion voters review. Someone could subvert the bar code to say one thing, while the human-readable portion says something else. Kiniry said they’re aiming to design their system without barcodes.
“That receipt does not permit you to prove anything about how you voted, but does permit you to prove that the system accurately captured your intent and your vote is in the final tally,” Kiniry said.
“Most of the system is split across hundreds of different files, each configured at various levels,” Sarah Jamie Lewis, a former security engineer for Amazon as well as a former computer scientist for England’s GCHQ intelligence agency, told Motherboard. “I’m used to dealing with Java code that runs across different packages and different teams, and this code somewhat defeats even my understanding.”
She said the system uses cryptographic solutions that are fairly new to the field and that have to be implemented in very specific ways to make the system auditable, but the design the programmers chose thwarts this.
Hackers are always finding a new way to exploit the things, might be this voting machine is Hack-proof and transparent to secure voting system.