1
00:00:09,470 --> 00:00:16,730
Let me introduce co-organisers, Matt Blaze and Kat.

2
00:00:22,030 --> 00:00:29,590
David and Brian are back there, who are our board members, waving hands.

3
00:00:31,250 --> 00:00:33,450
This year we have an exciting programme.

4
00:00:33,450 --> 00:00:35,750
We have a two-day speaker track.

5
00:00:35,750 --> 00:00:41,070
We have a vendor, Wotec, who are doing a check-in kiosk.

6
00:00:41,070 --> 00:00:46,590
They will introduce their stuff at 11.15 as an introductory talk.

7
00:00:46,710 --> 00:00:55,070
At noon, a little bit after noon, we have an unboxing of Dominion ballot marking device, which has been at the heart of a lot of controversies.

8
00:00:55,090 --> 00:01:07,230
And tomorrow we will have a talk based on the controversy of the executive report recently unsealed by federal judge and the countering paper by MITRE.

9
00:01:07,230 --> 00:01:09,390
So, a lot of attention there.

10
00:01:10,270 --> 00:01:12,410
Matt, you had a few slides.

11
00:01:14,730 --> 00:01:16,170
Hi, everybody.

12
00:01:16,170 --> 00:01:17,350
My name is Kat.

13
00:01:17,350 --> 00:01:20,410
I am the co-organiser of the Voting Village.

14
00:01:20,410 --> 00:01:23,810
I wanted to thank you all so much for being here.

15
00:01:23,810 --> 00:01:25,650
Thank you, as Hari said.

16
00:01:25,650 --> 00:01:26,150
Woo!

17
00:01:26,150 --> 00:01:27,250
Give it up for Kat!

18
00:01:29,710 --> 00:01:33,130
It's also my birthday tomorrow, just so everybody knows.

19
00:01:33,670 --> 00:01:35,230
They're going to kill me for saying that.

20
00:01:35,230 --> 00:01:37,150
So, I'm really excited to be here.

21
00:01:37,150 --> 00:01:42,330
It's quadrupled in size from last year, so we're really, really proud of what we've accomplished.

22
00:01:42,530 --> 00:01:46,710
We have a number of incredible panel speakers.

23
00:01:47,210 --> 00:01:48,430
We have workshops.

24
00:01:48,810 --> 00:01:53,830
We have an incredible voting systems manufacturer that's here that Hari said.

25
00:01:53,830 --> 00:01:55,750
We've put a lot of work into it.

26
00:01:55,750 --> 00:01:58,550
We have countless volunteers.

27
00:01:58,550 --> 00:02:07,890
We have so many people that stepped up and so many people that care about democracy and that care about making it safer and care about preserving election integrity.

28
00:02:07,890 --> 00:02:13,290
And it's amazing how many true patriots are in this room that want to make a difference.

29
00:02:13,290 --> 00:02:15,850
And it's an honour to be a part of this.

30
00:02:15,850 --> 00:02:19,950
And I feel blessed to be amongst such incredibly brilliant minds.

31
00:02:19,950 --> 00:02:21,410
So, thank you so much.

32
00:02:21,410 --> 00:02:22,790
Thank you for this opportunity.

33
00:02:22,790 --> 00:02:30,290
And I really hope that you all enjoy or at least learn something or question something while you're here at The Village this year.

34
00:02:33,700 --> 00:02:35,120
Thanks, Kat.

35
00:02:37,120 --> 00:02:38,720
So, I'm Matt Blaze.

36
00:02:38,720 --> 00:02:42,380
I'm one of the co-founders of The Village along with Hari.

37
00:02:43,700 --> 00:02:46,380
So, the Voting Village has evolved.

38
00:02:46,920 --> 00:03:06,960
We got our start after the Digital Millennium Copyright Act had an exemption passed that allowed for good faith security research that would otherwise have been illegal, allowing us to reverse engineer and take apart and find security vulnerabilities in,

39
00:03:06,960 --> 00:03:08,900
among other things, voting equipment.

40
00:03:08,900 --> 00:03:19,240
So, we started out by buying as many surplus voting machines as we could find, putting them in a room and letting the DEF CON community loose on them.

41
00:03:19,240 --> 00:03:21,680
And we are continuing to do that.

42
00:03:21,680 --> 00:03:24,740
As you can see, we've got voting machines all over the room.

43
00:03:24,740 --> 00:03:26,380
Feel free to break them.

44
00:03:26,380 --> 00:03:29,180
Just do it in interesting ways and tell us about it.

45
00:03:29,180 --> 00:03:33,480
And try to, more importantly, try to understand how they work.

46
00:03:33,480 --> 00:03:54,400
We have become kind of the preeminent event for helping technical experts learn about the problems and solutions in elections and how to have high-integrity elections and how to separate BS from legitimate concerns.

47
00:03:54,640 --> 00:04:02,800
And I have a couple of slides that I want to put up just to kind of give a sense of how this world is...

48
00:04:03,400 --> 00:04:05,460
what the problems in this world are.

49
00:04:05,460 --> 00:04:10,360
There are two truths in voting, and they're both true.

50
00:04:11,220 --> 00:04:14,640
And they're unsatisfying by themselves.

51
00:04:14,640 --> 00:04:24,220
The first is that there are, in fact, as you will see here, genuine, serious vulnerabilities in parts of U.S.

52
00:04:24,220 --> 00:04:33,520
election infrastructure that, under some circumstances, if they're exploited, could alter election outcomes or could be used to alter election outcomes.

53
00:04:33,520 --> 00:04:38,680
That's irrefutably possible in some circumstances.

54
00:04:38,680 --> 00:04:43,380
But at the same time, there's no credible evidence.

55
00:04:43,380 --> 00:04:47,240
And by no, I really mean zero credible evidence that any U.S.

56
00:04:47,240 --> 00:04:53,720
election has ever had its outcome altered by the exploitation of technical vulnerabilities.

57
00:04:54,400 --> 00:04:56,960
So how do we square those two things?

58
00:04:56,960 --> 00:05:09,000
Now, it's certainly logically possible for both of them to be true, but which one you want to emphasize tends to depend on how happy you are with the results of some election.

59
00:05:10,140 --> 00:05:27,780
We're here to acknowledge both of these realities and help equip you to sort through them when someone says, hey, there's this vulnerability, the election was rigged, to see if that's actually a credible statement or not.

60
00:05:28,260 --> 00:05:31,360
In fact, there are two different problems here.

61
00:05:31,360 --> 00:05:37,260
One is making election technology and protocols and the systems around them more trustworthy.

62
00:05:37,260 --> 00:05:41,260
And that's actually what we as technologists tend to focus on.

63
00:05:41,900 --> 00:05:46,660
And there are actually a lot of really interesting problems here.

64
00:05:47,220 --> 00:05:51,780
And we've actually made significant progress on them over the last decade.

65
00:05:51,780 --> 00:05:54,580
It's really amazing how much progress we've made on this.

66
00:05:54,580 --> 00:06:04,440
But there's a second problem, which is increasing public confidence in election outcomes to go along with the improvements that have been made and how trustworthy they are.

67
00:06:04,440 --> 00:06:11,980
And sometimes these two are at odds because in order to make progress on the technology, we have to expose the problems.

68
00:06:12,160 --> 00:06:16,300
So putting that into context is one of our big problems here.

69
00:06:16,300 --> 00:06:29,280
And you might recall that some of the things from the voting village were pointed to by people who doubted the outcome of both the 2016 and 2020 elections.

70
00:06:29,820 --> 00:06:32,880
So , in fact, the stakes are kind of high.

71
00:06:32,880 --> 00:06:38,960
This was people who didn't believe in election outcomes held a little riot in Washington a couple of years ago.

72
00:06:39,460 --> 00:06:41,900
And , you know, people died.

73
00:06:42,020 --> 00:06:49,120
And, you know, our democracy could have actually potentially fallen as a result of this.

74
00:06:49,600 --> 00:06:51,920
So what does this look like?

75
00:06:51,920 --> 00:06:54,160
Well, here's the first problem.

76
00:06:54,220 --> 00:07:02,260
Technology and automation has become absolutely essential to the conduct of elections in most of the U.S.

77
00:07:02,260 --> 00:07:04,760
You can't hold an election without computers.

78
00:07:04,760 --> 00:07:16,020
And as we all know, computers, and particularly large-scale software-based systems, are inherently unreliable and untrustworthy.

79
00:07:16,160 --> 00:07:26,680
So one question is, you know, how do we manage the fact that there may be flaws in the technology that we use to hold elections?

80
00:07:26,680 --> 00:07:35,280
And some of those flaws, if the system isn't designed well, could end up being fatal to our ability to know who won.

81
00:07:35,280 --> 00:07:46,220
So one of the things that's important is to find ways to deal with the fact that we're trying to build a highly trustworthy system from inherently untrustworthy components.

82
00:07:46,260 --> 00:07:51,400
And sometimes that's possible and sometimes that's not, depending on how the system is designed.

83
00:07:51,540 --> 00:07:59,880
Now, over my career in voting, there have been two approaches to trying to improve voting technology.

84
00:07:59,880 --> 00:08:04,320
One is to try to eliminate all the defects in the underlying technology.

85
00:08:04,760 --> 00:08:08,420
And that's actually what we were doing up until about 10 years ago.

86
00:08:08,420 --> 00:08:13,000
We were looking at systems, examining them, and trying to find and fix all the bugs.

87
00:08:13,020 --> 00:08:15,720
That didn't actually work all that well.

88
00:08:15,720 --> 00:08:19,900
We found and fixed lots of bugs, but we never know when we found the last one.

89
00:08:20,420 --> 00:08:27,960
So, you know, that approach was the best we had, even though it was inherently kind of doomed to fail.

90
00:08:27,960 --> 00:08:41,740
But over the last 10 years, we've evolved a different approach, which is to embrace the fact that the technology is going to be flawed and try to find ways to use it that tolerate inevitable flaws.

91
00:08:41,740 --> 00:08:46,780
And there were two big breakthroughs about a decade ago that let us do this.

92
00:08:46,780 --> 00:08:54,380
The first was Ron Rivest, who came up with a set of requirements called software independence.

93
00:08:54,380 --> 00:09:09,700
And then there was Philip Stark, a statistician at Berkeley, who's a co-board member of the Voting Village, who came up with a technique for doing this with certain types of voting equipment called risk-limiting audits.

94
00:09:09,700 --> 00:09:17,360
And we'll actually be having a talk about how to do a risk-limiting audit and a demo of risk-limiting audits throughout our program.

95
00:09:17,940 --> 00:09:22,420
Okay, so some voting tech can't be built in reliable ways.

96
00:09:22,420 --> 00:09:29,680
In particular, DRE touchscreen voting machines can't be used in a way where we can audit them.

97
00:09:29,680 --> 00:09:32,680
Software flaws can be fatal there.

98
00:09:32,680 --> 00:09:39,400
But other voting technology, particularly that uses paper ballots, actually we know how to do that.

99
00:09:39,500 --> 00:09:51,820
And one of the things we're hoping is that we're going to equip you to work with local election officials to implement some of these secure auditing techniques in your local communities.

100
00:09:51,820 --> 00:09:56,540
Because this has to be done on kind of a county-by-county, state-by-state basis.

101
00:09:56,540 --> 00:09:59,800
So there's enough work to do for everyone in this room.

102
00:09:59,980 --> 00:10:08,300
And I'm hoping that all of you will spend the whole conference here learning about voting equipment and pretend that there's nothing else going on.

103
00:10:08,300 --> 00:10:11,320
There's nothing else interesting going on here at DEF CON.

104
00:10:11,780 --> 00:10:25,060
So, you know, there's just plenty to do and we really need people to go back home and understand this, explain it to your local community, work with your local election officials, become a poll worker.

105
00:10:25,060 --> 00:10:29,100
That's a great way to get a sort of introduction to the right people.

106
00:10:29,100 --> 00:10:34,080
Learn how these systems work on the ground and help contribute.

107
00:10:34,080 --> 00:10:36,320
You can have a huge, huge impact.

108
00:10:36,560 --> 00:10:38,480
All right, so thanks very much.

109
00:10:38,760 --> 00:10:43,400
So in about five minutes or so, we're going to start our first panel.

110
00:10:43,400 --> 00:10:46,180
We'll take a little break to get everybody together.

111
00:10:46,180 --> 00:10:50,960
Anyone who's on the first panel who doesn't have a microphone, please go to the back of the room and see Jutta.

112
00:10:51,160 --> 00:10:52,200
Thanks very much.

113
00:10:52,200 --> 00:10:53,880
Let me turn this back over to Harri.

114
00:10:56,720 --> 00:10:58,020
Thank you, Matt.

115
00:10:58,360 --> 00:11:04,820
I want to remind and underline our mission in Voting Village is educational.

116
00:11:05,760 --> 00:11:08,340
All voting machines can be hacked.

117
00:11:08,340 --> 00:11:09,760
That's not news.

118
00:11:10,060 --> 00:11:11,240
At all.

119
00:11:11,820 --> 00:11:18,560
We are educating how the vulnerabilities work, how you can exploit, how the machinery works.

120
00:11:18,560 --> 00:11:25,660
And if you accidentally discover something new, we have scribes who are documenting down your findings.

121
00:11:25,760 --> 00:11:28,720
So if you see something, say something.

122
00:11:29,400 --> 00:11:33,660
With that being said, the volunteers are here to educate, help.

123
00:11:33,660 --> 00:11:36,140
We are happy to answer any questions.

124
00:11:36,300 --> 00:11:38,200
And on we go.

125
00:11:38,200 --> 00:11:40,800
And you can identify the volunteers.

126
00:11:40,800 --> 00:11:46,220
We have these awesomely cool shirts designed by Cat, which have the DEF CON logo and an I Voted sticker.

127
00:11:46,220 --> 00:11:47,640
You can't get these.

128
00:11:47,640 --> 00:11:50,080
You can only get them by being a volunteer.

129
00:11:50,080 --> 00:11:52,100
And if we have extras, we'll be selling them later.

130
00:11:52,200 --> 00:11:54,380
So thanks very much.

131
00:11:54,380 --> 00:11:56,740
We have about five minutes before our first panel.

132
00:11:56,880 --> 00:11:57,860
So stick around.