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The three-day "Voting Village," which opens in Las Vegas on
Friday, also aims to expose vulnerabilities in devices such as
digital poll books and memory-card readers.
Def Con held its first voting village last year after U.S.
intelligence agencies concluded the Russian government used
hacking in its attempt to support Donald Trump's 2016 candidacy
for president. Moscow has denied the allegations.
Organizers have returned ahead of the November elections, in
which Democrats hope to take control of the U.S. House of
Representatives. Trump's national security team last week warned
that Russia had launched "pervasive" efforts to interfere in the
elections.
"These vulnerabilities that will be identified over the course
of the next three days would, in an actual election, cause mass
chaos," said Jake Braun, one of the village's organizers. "They
need to be identified and addressed, regardless of the
environment in which they are found."
Participants will have a chance to hack into more than five
types of voting machines from manufacturers including Elections
Systems & Software and Dominion Voting.
Last year a Danish researcher figured out how to take control of
a touch-screen voting system used through 2014 in a remote hack
that organizers said could work from up to 1,000 feet away.
A group representing U.S. secretaries of state lauded the goal
of bolstering election security, but warned that the findings
might be skewed.
"It utilizes a pseudo environment which in no way replicates
state election systems, networks or physical security," the
National Association of Secretaries of State said in a
statement.
"Providing conference attendees with unlimited physical access
to voting machines, most of which are no longer in use, does not
replicate accurate physical and cyber protections established by
state and local governments before and on Election Day," the
group said.
Verified Voting, an advocacy group that helped organize the
hacking village, said that some of the voting machine models
being tested are still used to tally votes across the United
States.
One system, the Dominion Premier/Diebold AccuVote TSx system, is
used in 20 states and 23,784 precincts, according to Verified
Voting.
(Reporting by Christopher Bing in Las Vegas; Editing by Jim
Finkle and Richard Chang)
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