Estonia's Guardtime develops cybersecurity solution for US elections
Estonian software security company Guardtime in cooperation with Swiss security technology company SICPA has developed a new election security solution for US elections which will offer blockchain-enabled protection of voter registries.
"In order to ensure the trustworthiness of the entire election process, it is important to make sure that the right vote given by the voter is recorded and counted on the basis of a trustworthy system," Martin Ruubel, president of Guardtime, said in a press release.
"This is why we developed a cybersecurity solution specially designed for US elections, which will integrate with voter registration and the voting system and ensure the correctness of data, while at the same time immediately identifying external interference in the data of the electoral system," Ruubel described. "We will initially implement this in the electoral system of one local government, but the need is of course broader."
Unlike in Estonia, in the US, citizens who have reached voting age are not automatically added to voter rolls; those who wish to register to vote must do so themselves. The new solution will help ensure the accuracy and security of this process by immediately identifying possible misinformation, the company said.
In the last US presidential elections in 2016, electronic voting in various forms was possible in more than 30 US states. At the same time, electronic voting by way of special voting machines is still available alongside ballot paper voting in most states.
The basis for the new solutions developed for the US elections is the keyless signature infrastructure (KSI) technology created and developed by Guardtime, which in essence is a mathematically ensured cybersecurity solution for identifying the use and misuse of digital data and devices. Thanks to its structure, the solution allows for the preservation of a history of changes in the digital data, the immediate identification of who has changed the digital data and when, and the implementation of these opportunities quickly and at once for large amounts of data.
Founded in Estonia, Guardtime is a company developing cybersecurity solutions that help to immediately identify changes made in various digital data and smart devices, and as a result offer trustworthy and transparent solutions for e-society.
Guardtime's technology has been integrated with many e-services used in Estonia, such as the State Gazette, the Land Register and the Commercial Register, among others. The company also cooperates with notable international institutions, such as Lockheed Martin, the world's largest defence industry company, the US Army, and the technology company Ericsson.
SICPA, the Swiss company that developed the solution in cooperation with Guardtime, is an experienced developer of security technologies that has helped create solutions for identifying fake currency, documents linked with fake identities and the misuse of data concerning voters and election results.
Editor: Aili Vahtla
Source: BNS