A Light-Weight e-Voting System with Distributed Trust

2000

A new agent-based scheme for secure electronic voting is proposed in the paper. It is universal and can be realized in a network of stationary and mobile electronic devices. The proposed mechanism makes possible to implement a user interface simulating traditional election cards, semi-mechanical voting devices or utilize purely electronic voting booths. The security mechanisms applied in the system are

iaeme

Electronic voting (EV) refers to the use of computers or computerized voting equipments to castballots in an election EV has been in development for more than 20 years, during which it has produced outstanding results both in theory and in practice. This paper presents a new secure preferential e-voting scheme. In this paper we will present an e-voting scheme that covers most of the e-voting requirements were implemented to guarantee voter’s privacy and authentication. A prototype implementation of EV protocol over the Internet which fulfils some electronic voting system requirements such as efficiency, transparency and mobility has been presented.

Future Generation Computer Systems, 2003

We present a secure and available electronic voting service suitable for a large-scale distributed system such as the Internet. The proposed service is based on replication and tolerates both benign and fully arbitrary failures. If enough servers are correct, service availability and security are ensured despite the presence of faulty servers and malicious voters. A voter that is affected by a crash failure can vote after recovery. The proposed service satisfies common voting requirements including voter eligibility and privacy, and tally accuracy. In addition, the service satisfies a further important requirement, namely tally verifiability without any intervention of voters. Anyone, including an external observer, can easily be convinced that the voting outcome is fairly computed from the ballots that were correctly cast. It follows that the proposed voting scheme strengthens the security properties of the electronic voting procedure, and simplifies the interaction of voters with the electronic voting system.

We describe the theory behind a practical voting scheme based on homomorphic encryption. We give an example of an ElGamal-style encryption scheme, which can be used as the underlying cryptosystem. Then, we present efficient honest verifier zero-knowledge proofs that make the messages in the voting scheme shorter and easier to compute and verify, for voters as well as authorities, than in currently known schemes. Finally, we discuss various issues connected with the security of a practical implementation of the scheme for on-line voting. Notably, this includes minimizing risks that are beyond what can be handled with cryptography, such as attacks that try to substitute the software running on client machines.

2009

This paper presents a hybrid e-voting system, in which a transparent e-voting protocol is embedded in a traditional paper-based voting procedure. To guarantee vote anonymity, the protocol itself is based on a scalable blind signature scheme with multiple authorities. An anonymous channel is used to cast the encrypted votes onto the public board. To prevent vote buying and vote coercion, we depart from the mainstream approach of taking additional measures to guarantee receipt-freeness. Instead, we propose to exploit the existence of a receipt to allow vote revocations over the enclosing paper-based voting procedure.

1997

AnKa Publisher, 2022

India conducts both state and federal elections using paperless electronic voting machines. Indian authorities have never allowed a meaningful, independent investigation of the security of the devices despite mounting fears of fraud. Blockchain is a technology that has gained a lot of attention recently because it uses an immutable distributed ledger to offer security and anonymity. In applications where trust is of the utmost significance, Blockchain is extensively used because of its reliable consensus mechanism and tamper-proof data storage. By combining all of the individually encrypted votes into one encrypted tally using the homomorphic property, you may obtain the separated-out tallies without compromising the privacy of individual votes. Homomorphic encryption methods are employed to work on the encrypted data without the knowledge of private key. If database data is lost, it may still be possible to recover it from the blockchain cloud. Data that has been encrypted can be operated on without having to first decrypt it. Data may be transferred and stored securely in cloud systems using Blockchain and Homomorphic mechanisms. In this paper we have expla ined the design, implementation and working of a dependable and trustworthy electronic voting application.

Computers & Security, 2005

In this paper we propose SEAS, the Secure E-voting Applet System, a portable, mobile, flexible, light system for polling over computer networks. The protocol is based on Sensus, . Though maintaining its lightness (basically there are two only servers involved in the whole voting process), SEAS avoids the well-known weakness that allows one of the entities involved in the election process to cast its own votes replacing other votes. We propose an implementation of SEAS based on Java applets and XML technology.

Journal of Information Security and Applications

A cryptographic electronic voting system is proposed, to replace the conventional voting methods, which are widely used in most developing countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. The proposed e-voting system is based on the concept of Prêt à Voter, which is a paper ballot e-voting scheme. Mixnet based e-voting schemes such as Prêt à Voter use mix servers to create anonymous channels. These schemes have some shortcomings; Mixnets need complex protocols for generating and maintaining shared mix keys, as well as for mixing and proving correctness of the shuffles. Moreover, Mixnets are complex to implement on a large scale. Mixnets are also vulnerable to corrupt or faulty mix servers as well. The proposed e-voting scheme eliminates the need for anonymous channels to anonymize the votes in Mixnet based e-voting schemes, yet provides comparable level of security and vote anonymity with less system complexity. The proposed e-voting scheme uses paper ballots, due to its familiarity among the public, but with strong cryptographic algorithms with proven security features, to provide enhanced level of ballot secrecy, verifiability and security. The proposed scheme is simple, secure, practical, and auditable. Security evaluation is conducted based on the critical and desirable properties of e-voting to support the claimed aspects. Threat analysis of the proposed e-voting system had been conducted to prove its resistance to well-known attacks on e-voting schemes and systems. A proof of concept implementation and simulation of the proposed e-voting scheme was developed to elucidate its efficiency, practicality, and scalability. The research proposal has the potential to be deployed as a trustworthy evoting system, to replace the conventional voting methods in developing countries.

IEEE Security & Privacy Magazine, 2006

In this paper, as a step towards the ultimate aim of developing an evoting system that would be likely to gain and retain the trust of the general voting public, we describe a design for a manual voting scheme that has, we claim, significant security-related advantages over existing well-trusted manual schemes. We then use this design as the basis for a small set of (in most cases partially-automated) voting systems which could improve the efficiency of our proposed manual voting scheme, without endangering the public's trust. Our approach to the design of these schemes is thus as much socio-technical as technical.

We present a new remote, coercion-resistant electronic voting protocol which satisfies a number of properties previously considered contradictory. We introduce trusted computing as a method of ensuring the trustworthiness of remote voters, and provide an extension to our protocol allowing revocable anonymity, on the grounds of it being a legal requirement in the United Kingdom.

Many electronic voting systems, classified mainly as homomorphic cryptography based, mix-net based and blind signature based, appear after the eighties when zero knowledge proofs were introduced. The common ground for all these three systems is that none of them works without real time cryptologic calculations that should be held on a server. As far as known, the agent-based approach has not been used in a secure electronic voting system. In this study, an agent-based electronic voting schema, which does not contain real time calculations on the server side, is proposed. Conventional cryptologic methods are used in the proposed schema and some of the requirements of an electronic voting system are constructed within the schema. The schema seems quite secure if the used cryptologic methods and agents are secure. In this paper, proposed schema will be explained and compared with already known electronic voting systems. Keywords—Electronic voting, E-voting, Mobile software agents, Offl...

Electronic voting provides accuracy and efficiency to the electoral processes. World democracies would benefit from a secure e-voting system not only to improve voter participation and trust but also to prevent electoral fraud. However, current e-voting systems are complex and have security weaknesses. In this paper, we describe a secure e-voting system for national and local elections. This system satisfies the important requirements of an e-voting system through state-of-the-art technologies and secure processes. The system relies on homomorphic cryptography, zero-knowledge proofs, biometrics, smartcards, open source software, and secure computers for securely and efficiently implementing the system processes over the various stages of electoral process. Furthermore, we describe the pilot implementations of this system that test the main technologies and processes used. We explain how the used technologies and processes achieve the system requirement. In conclusion, we recommend adopting this system for its security, flexibility, economic, and scalability features.

Currently voting process throughout the world is done using Electronic Voting Machines. Though this system is widely followed, there are many drawbacks of the system. People have to travel to their assigned poll booth stations, wait in long queues to cast their vote, face unnecessary problems and so on. It becomes difficult for working profession people or elderly/ sick people to cast their vote due to this system. This calls for a change in system which can be done if voting processes in conducted online. Few developed countries are trying to implement online voting system on small scale and have been successful in doing so. We propose a system which overcomes limitations of existing online system which uses bio-metric technologies and instead use One Time Password system which is more secure and accurate. As a result, the aim of this paper is twofold. Firstly, to spot the set of generic constitutional requirements, which should be met when designing an e-voting system for general elections? This set will cause the precise (design) principles of a legally acceptable e-voting system. Secondly to spot , using the Rational Unified Process, the wants of an adequately secure evoting system. These Requirements system from the design principles identified previously. The paper concludes that an e-voting capability should, for the nonce , be considered only as a complementary means to the normal election processes. This is mainly thanks to the digital divide, to the inherent distrust within the e-voting procedure, also on the inadequacy of the prevailing technological means to satisfy certain requirements.

Computer Standards & Interfaces, 2003

An electronic voting system makes it possible for the voters to cast their ballots over the computer network. Hence, voters 11 can participate in elections without having to go to the polling places, which is more convenient and efficient. To design a 12 practical voting scheme, Mu and Varadharajan have recently proposed an anonymous secure electronic voting scheme to be 13 applied over the network. It does not only protect voters' privacy and prevent double voting, but also suits large-scale elections. 14 However, the scheme has a weakness in security; that is, some voters may still double vote without being detected and may 15 even reveal information they should not. In this paper, we shall show this weakness and improve the scheme to increase the 16 protection against fraudulence. 17 D 2002 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. 18 19 23