Drew Springall

DEF CON 33 - Voting Village - "Fortress Island" Physical Security in Voting Systems

Physical security has long been a core component of voting system defenses through the use of keyed locks and tamper-evident seals/tape/stickers. With procedural protections requiring their use, arbitrary voters are explicitly permitted to physically interact with these systems in a semi-private setting (voting booth) under the assumption that the hardware’s attack surface can be sufficiently scoped to a set of intended, known-safe interactions (i.e. limit/prevent access to I/O interfaces, administrative controls, storage devices, etc.). Some have even cited these specific defenses as preexisting and sufficient mitigations for vulnerabilities in already-deployed voting system such that further remediation is not needed. Unfortunately, this assumption does not hold under scrutiny. This presentation provides a review of publicly available sources from vendors, jurisdictions, and assorted other entities and reveals substantial weaknesses in the design, configuration, and deployment of such defensive devices.