HackerOne Drops Mobile Voting App Vendor Voatz

Mobile voting application vendor Voatz has been dismissed from HackerOne's bug bounty program platform, according to a report on CyberScoop.

Voatz — whose mobile voting app used in limited elections in a handful of states, including West Virginia and Colorado — has been under intense scrutiny over security concerns, and recently published studies by MIT and Trail of Bits uncovered significant security weaknesses in the app.

While security experts long have dismissed mobile voting as inherently risky, proponents of mobile-voting have maintained that the apps and process are more secure and private, for example, than the standard practice of sending PDF-based ballots via unencrypted email to military personnel overseas.

Voatz recently had updated its bug bounty policy on HackerOne to say that it could not "guarantee safe harbor" for researchers who discover flaws in its software under the program, CyberScoop said in its report.

"After evaluating Voatz's pattern of interactions with the research community, we decided to terminate the program on the HackerOne platform," a HackerOne spokesperson said in the CyberScoop report. "We partner with organizations that prioritize acting in good faith towards the security researcher community and providing adequate access to researchers for testing."

Voatz plans to kick off a new bug bounty program, it said.

See the full article here.

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