Internet Voting System Research Articles

An Independent Assessment of the Procedural Components of the Estonian Internet Voting System

The I-Voting system that was designed and implemented in Estonia in 2005 is the first Internet voting system to have been adopted anywhere in the world. Since its inception, it has been met with both praise and scrutiny. Concerns include in-person election observations, code reviews, and adversarial testing on system components. As a result of these concerns, some parties have concluded that there are various ways in which insider threats and sophisticated external attacks could compromise the system’s integrity and thus the voting process. This paper examines the procedural components of the I-Voting system, with an emphasis on the controls related to procedural security mechanisms, high-level operational security aspects, and system transparency measures. The methodological approach is based on both primary and secondary data sources, including interviews with key Estonian election personnel, in order to determine the extent to which the present controls mitigate the security risks faced by the system. This study makes three main arguments. First, we found procedural controls to be fundamentally important to the design of the I-Voting system. While these mechanisms go a long way toward preventing cyberattacks, problems in the system still exist. For instance, some security situations appear to be addressed in informal ways which rely heavily on the knowledge, experience, and professional relationships between officials. Second, in terms of operational controls, we were generally impressed by the state of the controls adopted, particularly the incident handling processes during elections, as well as checks and investigations during and after elections. Our main concern regarding resilience is the increasing potential for more highly sophisticated attacks. As time progresses, attackers will naturally become stronger, and the system will have to adapt in order to accommodate this evolution. Third, the system’s transparency measures have had a noteworthy impact on building confidence and trust in the I-Voting system, both locally and internationally. Challenges still exist, however, especially pertaining to the difficulty in running voter awareness campaigns, as well as increasing voter usage of transparency measures.

ESIV: an end-to-end secure internet voting system

Nowadays, with the growing popularity of e-Government services, security of client platforms and violation of citizen e-rights are of great concerns. Since Internet-voting protocols have no control over voter-side platforms, bribery/coercion and breaching vote’s privacy and voter’s anonymity are feasible. In fact, the voter-side platform (voter’s PC) is easily vulnerable to malicious software (cyber-attacks) and can totally breach security of the entire voting protocol. We have proposed ESIV: an end-to-end secure internet-voting system that highly guarantees: voter and server-side platform’s security, verifiability, fairness, resistance to bribery/coercion and voting authorities collusion besides simultaneous election support while preserving eligibility, anonymity, privacy and trust. In addition, we utilize Java Card 3 technology as an independent secure web-server which is connected directly to network in order to send/receive HTTP(S) requests using high-speed interfaces. This technology brings about independence from utilizing any trusted device at voter-side and provides end-to-end security. Finally, an implementation of ESIV is presented and ESIV security features are evaluated.

Internet Voting: An Empirical Evaluation

The results of testing an Internet voting system, introduced as a pilot program in the Canton of Zurich in 2004, provide hard evidence of attitudes toward electronic voting and underline the need to rely on more advanced technology and centralized infrastructure.

EVIV: An end-to-end verifiable Internet voting system

Traditionally, a country's electoral system requires the voter to vote at a specific day and place, which conflicts with the mobility usually seen in modern live styles. Thus, the widespread of Internet (mobile) broadband access can be seen as an opportunity to deal with this mobility problem, i.e. the adoption of an Internet voting system can make the live of voter's much more convenient; however, a widespread Internet voting systems adoption relies on the ability to develop trustworthy systems, i.e. systems that are verifiable and preserve the voter's privacy. Building such a system is still an open research problem.Our contribution is a new Internet voting system: EVIV, a highly sound End-to-end Verifiable Internet Voting system, which offers full voter's mobility and preserves the voter's privacy from the vote casting PC even if the voter votes from a public PC, such as a PC at a cybercafé or at a public library. Additionally, EVIV has private vote verification mechanisms, in which the voter just has to perform a simple match of two small strings (4–5 alphanumeric characters), that detect and protect against vote manipulations both at the insecure vote client platform and at the election server side.

Internet voting and political participation

One emerging facet of e-government is Internet voting, or i-voting. I-voting refers to the secure transmission of a ballot via the Internet. This phenomenon has the potential to increase citizen participation in the democratic process. However, few studies have identified the unique characteristics that make i-voting an appealing option. In particular, there Is a need for research that identifies the impacts of both technological and political factors on intentions to use an Internet voting system. In this study, we propose a model inclusive of technological, situational and political factors. To test the model we administer a survey to a diverse pool of citizens with regards to age, income, and education. Results indicate that relative advantage and trust of the Internet impact intentions to use Internet voting, while party mobilization and political interest impact propensity to vote. Further, it was found that perceived Internet accessibility impacts the perceived convenience of voting online, which in turn impacts the perceived relative advantage of online voting. Implications of these findings for research and practice are discussed. We conclude with recommendations for future research. As local and state governments begin to experiment with internet voting, now is the time to identify the Internet-specific characteristics that will attract non-voters and retain habitual voters.

Practical Internet voting system

Recently, Internet voting systems have gained popularity and have been used for government elections and referendums in the United Kingdom, Estonia and Switzerland as well as municipal elections in Canada and party primary elections in the United States and France. Current Internet voting systems assume either the voter's personal computer is trusted or the voter is not physically coerced. In this paper, we present an Internet voting system, in which the voter's choice remains secret even if the voter's personal computer is infected by malware or the voter is physically controlled by the adversary. In order to analyze security of our system, we give a formal definition of coercion-resistance, and provide security proof that our system is coercion-resistant. In particular, our system can achieve absolute verifiability even if all election authorities are corrupt. Based on homomorphic encryption, the overhead for tallying in our system is linear in the number of voters. Thus, our system is practical for elections at a large scale, such as general elections.

Building and Maintaining Trust in Internet Voting

Voting codes, risk analysis, and election forensics can help the public build and maintain trust in an Internet voting system by assuring that it meets important security and privacy requirements.

A Receipt-free Coercion-resistant Remote Internet Voting Protocol without Physical Assumptions through Deniable Encryption and Trapdoor Commitment Scheme

The secure remote Internet voting protocol play an important role in Internet voting system. The direction of development of remote Internet voting protocol is that implementation of receipt-freeness and coercion-resistance is from with strong physical assumptions to with weak physical assumptions. The final purpose is that receipt-freeness and coercion-resistance is implemented without physical assumptions. In this paper firstly, a receipt-free coercion-resistant remote Internet voting protocol based on M W deniable encryption scheme and BCP commitment scheme is developed. To our best knowledge the proposed remote Internet voting protocol, which has receipt-freeness and coercion-resistance, is the first remote Internet voting protocol implemented without physical assumptions. Secondly, we analyze receipt-freeness and coercion-resistance of the proposed remote Internet voting protocol. Finally, we compare security properties of several typical protocols with our present protocol.

An electronic voting system supporting vote weights

PurposeThis paper aims to provide a solution for allowing an arbitrary number of weights and weight values to be used in an electronic voting system.Design/methodology/approachRobust Electronic Voting System (REVS) was chosen, a voting system designed to support internet voting processes, as the start point for studying the introduction of vote weights.FindingsThe work resulted in an internet voting system supporting vote weights, based on REVS.Research limitations/implicationsIn the solution presented, there is still a problem regarding anonymity, for the case of a single voter with a particular weighted vote. This is a fundamental problem, since it also exists in paper‐based elections.Practical implicationsThis version of REVS has the same properties as the original REVS, apart from the anonymity issue above. Apart from this the process of registering voters got more complicated, since now it includes an extra action for binding a weight.Originality/valueTo the best of the authors' knowledge, this modified version of REVS is the first electronic voting system supporting vote weights. Another novelty of this work is the modulus sharing optimization used for the RSA key pairs of each entity.

The design of a secure anonymous Internet voting system

In this paper, we propose a very practical and secure anonymous Internet voting protocol. Our scheme does not require a special voting channel and communications can occur entirely over the current Internet. This method integrates Internet convenience and cryptology. Issues such as the kinds of “certificate authority” and “public proxy server” are integrated in our scheme to solve the Internet identification and anonymity problems. This protocol combines the RSA blind signature scheme and secret sharing cryptosystem, to provide a fair and practical election.