https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/yw84q7/darpa-is-building-a-dollar... The system will be fully open source and designed with newly developed secure hardware to make the system not only impervious to certain kinds of hacking, but also allow voters to verify that their votes were recorded accurately. [...] The first-of-its-kind system will be designed by an Oregon-based firm called Galois, a longtime government contractor with experience in designing secure and verifiable systems. The system will use fully open source voting software, instead of the closed, proprietary software currently used in the vast majority of voting machines, which no one outside of voting machine testing labs can examine. More importantly, it will be built on secure open source hardware, made from special secure designs and techniques developed over the last year as part of a special program at DARPA. The voting system will also be designed to create fully verifiable and transparent results so that voters don’t have to blindly trust that the machines and election officials delivered correct results. But DARPA and Galois won’t be asking people to blindly trust that their voting systems are secure—as voting machine vendors currently do. Instead they’ll be publishing source code for the software online and bring prototypes of the systems to the Def Con Voting Village this summer and next, so that hackers and researchers will be able to freely examine the systems themselves and conduct penetration tests to gauge their security. They’ll also be working with a number of university teams over the next year to have them examine the systems in formal test environments. [...] The systems Galois designs won’t be available for sale. But the prototypes it creates will be available for existing voting machine vendors or others to freely adopt and customize without costly licensing fees or the millions of dollars it would take to research and develop a secure system from scratch. “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.” [...] “If we were to build a fake radar system, it could demonstrate secure hardware, but it wouldn’t be useful to anybody. [DARPA] love the fact that we’re building a demonstrator that might actually be useful to the world,” Kiniry said. [...] The DARPA secure hardware program involves six teams from several universities as well as Lockheed Martin. Each team was tasked with creating three secure CPU designs. Galois, which is part of the SSITH project, plans to build its voting system on top of the secure hardware designed by these teams, and will create a prototype for each CPU design. [...] Not only are teams developing secure CPUs but to best take advantage of what a secure CPU offers, they’re developing new versions of open source C-compilers so they can recompile the entire software stack on a system—the operating system, the kernel, all the libraries and all the user software that’s written in C. [...]