Jonathan Johnson, CEO of Overstock and president of Medici Ventures, has issued a statement supporting blockchain in voting in response to the technology's vulnerabilities claims published on February. thirteen.

Emerging technologies got in the crosshairs of regulators when a mobile software application that had been devised to help calculate the total number of votes in the contempo Iowa Democratic caucus reportedly malfunctioned, resulting in the Democratic Party having to delay its public reporting of last Monday'south results.

Just does blockchain actually fail when it comes to elections?

Following the Iowa caucus scandal, blockchain-based voting apps vicious under scrutiny, which resulted in a Massachusetts Constitute of Engineering science's security analysis of Voatz, the cocky-styled commencement Net voting awarding used in The states federal elections.

The researchers claimed that they had found vulnerabilities in Voatz that enable "different kinds of adversaries to modify, cease, or expose a user's vote, including a sidechannel attack in which a completely passive network adversary tin can potentially recover a user's hugger-mugger election."

As such, the authors of the analysis concluded that the app is not secure, calculation that "our findings serve as a physical illustration of the common wisdom against Internet voting, and of the importance of transparency to the legitimacy of elections."

In the meantime, Voatz carried out its own analysis through the CISA Chase and Incident Response Team (HIRT) to make up one's mind if there was show of targeted malicious activeness in the app'south network. HIRT ended:

"HIRT analysts did not detect threat histrion behaviors or artifacts of by activities on the in-scope portions of the Voatz networks. HIRT identified some areas where defence-in-depth protections and configurations could be improved to assistance Voatz's IT security personnel defend their enterprise network. HIRT commends Voatz for their proactive measures in the use of canaries, bug bounties, Shodan alerts, and agile internal scanning and red teaming."

Tech discussions run to extremes

In his Feb. 13 statement, Johnson backed Voatz, saying that information technology prevents voting fraud and safeguards the privacy of each voter. He outlined that contempo speculations effectually applied science in elections had run to extremes turning to an anti-technology and anti-learning stance. Johnson said:

"I firmly believe this undermines American progress. This simulated premise is shutting down our pursuit of piloting, testing and developing technologies that not only mitigate risks, but makes voting accessible for populations who cannot physically become to the polls."

Earlier in Feb, another major blockchain-powered voting firm, Votem, pointed out that it is still not completely clear what function the app provided for the Iowa Caucus. Pete Martin, CEO of Votem, said in an email to Cointelegraph:

"Our cess is that this was not truly mobile voting where a verifiably authenticated voter is casting a verifiable and auditable electronic encrypted ballot that is shuffled and publicly tallied. The Caucus is unique in that the voter'southward identity is known, but in most cases the voters identity is separated from their election to protect their identity, all of which we particular in our "Proof of Vote" protocol."