ACES Students Innovate Election Security Measures

Voting machines face various risks, from physical theft to technical malfunctions and sophisticated cyberattacks. Addressing these vulnerabilities is critical for maintaining public trust in election integrity. A team of students and researchers from Towson University and the University of Maryland is working on identifying and mitigating these risks to ensure secure elections.

Natalie M. Scala, co-director of the Empowering Secure Elections Lab, highlights the importance of voter confidence in a healthy democracy. The lab's efforts are funded by a three-year grant from the U.S. Department of Defense and aim to assess the risks to voting machines, especially precinct count optical scanners, which will be widely used in upcoming elections.

ACES students Noah Hibbler '25 and Aaryan Patel '26 play a crucial role in this project. They have adapted publicly available JavaScript code to create an "attack tree"—a visual representation of potential security breaches. This graphic outlines possible issues such as equipment theft or cyberattacks and evaluates these attacks' cost, technical difficulty, and detectability. Without their contributions, the analysis would have required manual tracing and calculations.

The students' work enhances the current understanding of election security and has broader implications for critical infrastructure protection, including the power grid. Their analysis complements the intelligence the U.S. Election Assistance Commission gathered and adapted to the ever-evolving technological landscape.

The analysis considers "how expensive it is for an attacker to do, how technically difficult it is for an attacker, and then how hard it is for the defender to find that something went wrong," said Hibbler, who is pursuing an ACES minor and plans to improve the tool in the fall semester.

"Hearing how the project will be used actually to improve critical infrastructure is mind-blowing," said Patel, a sophomore in the Honors ACES program. "You often struggle to see how the work you do in class can really be applied to what you will do in the future."

The lab has previously trained poll workers in Anne Arundel County and surveyed voters about potential barriers to voting. Combined with the attack tree analysis, these efforts provide valuable insights for election officials like David Garreis, director of the Anne Arundel County Board of Elections. He emphasizes the importance of such partnerships in identifying and addressing security vulnerabilities.

Read the full article at https://today.umd.edu/how-safe-are-voting-machines-dod-funded-lab-ids-vulnerabilities

Published July 8, 2024