DEF CON 2026 Highlights
Last month we attended DEF CON for our third year. (See our 2024 report)
We got to have many great & deep conversations with scientists, engineers, and hackers working on election security, including some of the most influential voices in the field.
We also walked through new solutions we've built for advanced threats raised at the Voting Village in years past:
- Strengthened Verification Numbers — to create software-independent ground truth against possibly widespread on-device malware.
- Reported-Corrupted Sum — to protect against false claims of tampering, from unhappy voters.
- Verifiable Private Overrides — to protect voters who face threats of bribery and/or coercion.
These latest designs got positive reviews from everyone who dug in, even longtime skeptics. And many people shared very helpful suggestions about our larger mission.
Other highlights
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Many thoughtful Q&A sessions with top security engineers & leaders from Google, Apple, Microsoft, and others.
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In-depth time with the Freedom of the Press Foundation technologists behind WEBCAT, which we wrote about in July. Digging in only made us even more excited.
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Fantastic talk from Roger Dingledine, the creator of Tor, about how the project has withstood many attacks over the years.
Inspiration: 21st-Century Governance
One big inspiration we left with, from Bruce Schneier's DEF CON keynote, that captures quite well the Why behind SIV:
We need society's laws to be as patchable as our computers. This is a hard problem in modern governance, well beyond AI — it's the problem of building governing structures for the speed and complexity of the information age.
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In a lot of ways I think about democracy as a system that leverages conflict to solve problems. Capitalism does too — competition. The idea in the mid-1700s was that these systems were cheap. So we'd build systems where competition works out what to do.
Fast forward to today: some corporations are bigger than nations, and competition has become extraordinarily expensive. Look up the cost — $20 billion for the last national election, just to figure out who's in charge. In that kind of world, I think we need to rebalance competition and collaboration, and how we use those two collectively as a society to figure out what to do.
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So I'd like to end with a call to action. Technically, we need to understand how AIs hack systems, build AIs that don't act like genies, and then build systems that are resilient to AI hacking. Politically, we need to govern and regulate at the speed of tech — otherwise the market failures will overwhelm our ability to govern them.