DEF CON's Franklin project turns hacker ingenuity on critical infrastructure

Jeff Moss has a problem with how we secure critical infrastructure. “We’ve been doing it wrong,” the DEF CON founder essentially told the crowd this week, and he’s betting the entire conference on a different approach.

The Franklin project, named after Benjamin Franklin’s volunteer fire department, is scaling up a model that already proved itself in the Voting Village. For years, hackers there found vulnerabilities in election systems that vendors and government auditors missed entirely. Now Moss is applying that same adversarial mindset to water systems, power grids, and other infrastructure most people don’t think about until the lights go out.

The shift is from passive bug bounties to active, structured collaboration between hackers and infrastructure operators. It’s the difference between locking your door and actually trying to break in to see what gives. The Voting Village results weren’t just academic — they led to real changes in how states procure and configure election equipment.

What’s different here is the scale and the stakes. Critical infrastructure is a patchwork of legacy systems, proprietary protocols, and underfunded IT departments. Throwing a DEF CON’s worth of creative, persistent hackers at that problem will surface issues that compliance checklists never catch. The question isn’t whether they’ll find serious vulnerabilities. It’s whether the operators will patch them faster than adversaries can exploit them. Moss seems to think shame is a powerful motivator — nobody wants to be the utility that ignored a DEF CON finding and got breached six months later.