Remote Electronic Voting in Uncontrolled Environments: A Classifying Survey

Abstract

Remote electronic voting, often called online or Internet voting, has been subject to research for the last four decades. It is regularly discussed in public debates, especially in the context of enabling voters to conveniently cast their ballot from home using their personal devices. Since these devices are not under the control of the electoral authority and could be potentially compromised, this setting is referred to as an “uncontrolled environment” for which special security assumptions have to be considered. This paper employs general election principles to derive cryptographic, technical, and organizational requirements for remote electronic voting. Based on these requirements, we have extended an existing methodology to assess online voting schemes and develop a corresponding reference attacker model to support the preparation of tailored protection profiles for different levels of elections. After presenting a broad survey of different voting schemes, we use this methodology to assess and classify those schemes comparatively by leveraging four election-specific attacker models.