Electronic Voting Technology Inspired Interactive Teaching and Learning Pedagogy and Curriculum Development for Cybersecurity Education

Cybersecurity is becoming increasingly important to individuals and society alike. However, due to its theoretical and practical complexity, keeping students interested in the foundations of cybersecurity is a challenge. One way to excite such interest is to tie it to current events, for example elections. Elections are important to both individuals and society, and typically dominate much of the news before and during the election. We are developing a curriculum based on elections and, in particular, an electronic voting protocol. Basing the curriculum on an electronic voting framework allows one to teach critical cybersecurity concepts such as authentication, privacy, secrecy, access control, encryption, and the role of non-technical factors such as policies and laws in cybersecurity, which must include societal and human factors. Student-centered interactions and projects allow them to apply the concepts, thereby reinforcing their learning

Enhancing and Implementing Fully Transparent Internet Voting

Voting over the internet has been the focus of significant research with the potential to solve many problems. Current implementations typically suffer from a lack of transparency, where the connection between vote casting and result tallying is seen as a black box by voters. A new protocol was recently proposed that allows full transparency, never obfuscating any step of the process, and splits authority between mutually-constraining conflicting parties. Achieving such transparency brings with it challenging issues. In this paper we propose an efficient algorithm for generating unique, anonymous identifiers (voting locations) that is based on the Chinese Remainder Theorem, we extend the functionality of an election to allow for races with multiple winners, and we introduce a prototype of this voting system implemented as a multiplatform web application

Internet Voting Protocols: An Analysis of the Cryptographic Operations per Phase

Internet voting is a good option for Colombia thanks to the expansion of mobile technology throughout the country and the interest of the government to implement the e-voting. For this reason, we study the e-voting protocols to establish if any of them is suitable for Colombian elections. However some of them imply a great number of cryptographic operations and therefore a great computational cost for the devices, which sometimes exceed their capacity. In this paper, we determine the number of cryptographic operations per phase of four e-voting protocols: one based on blind signatures (Li, Hwang and Lai protocol), one based on mix nets (Meng protocol), one based on homomorphic encryption (EVIV protocol) and one used in real electoral processes (I-Voting for Estonian Elections). Then, we analyze the changes in the number of operations when the number of voters, number of votes, number of authorities and number of candidates increase for small, medium and large elections. Finally, we establish the protocol that imply a less number of cryptographic operations and is suitable for big electoral processes, such as congress elections in Colombia

Koinonia: verifiable e-voting with long-term privacy

Despite years of research, many existing e-voting systems do not adequately protect voting privacy. In most cases, such systems only achieve "immediate privacy", that is, they only protect voting privacy against today's adversaries, but not against a future adversary, who may possess better attack technologies like new cryptanalysis algorithms and/or quantum computers. Previous attempts at providing long-term voting privacy (dubbed "everlasting privacy" in the literature) often require additional trusts in parties that do not need to be trusted for immediate privacy. In this paper, we present a framework of adversary models regarding e-voting systems, and analyze possible threats to voting privacy under each model. Based on our analysis, we argue that secret-sharing based voting protocols offer a more natural and elegant privacy-preserving solution than their encryption-based counterparts. We thus design and implement Koinonia, a voting system that provides long-term privacy against powerful adversaries and enables anyone to verify that each ballot is well-formed and the tallying is done correctly. Our experiments show that Koinonia protects voting privacy with a reasonable performance

Preventing international terrorism. European models of rewarding measures for judicial cooperators

The absence of literature on reward measures in the European context is counterbalanced by an immense literature on the repressive-preventive key, which bets on the necessity and efficacy of its role mostly of neutralisation, rather than prevention. The book contains the results of the research project “Fighter” (Fight Against International Terrorism. Discovering European Models of Rewarding Measures to Prevent Terrorism), financed by the European Commission (Justice Programme 2014-2020), which has involved eight European Universities: Università degli studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia (P.I.), Università degli studi di Ferrara, Sveucˇilisˇte u Zagrebu - Pravni Fakultet, Université Saint-Louis Bruxelles, Université du Luxembourg, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Ludwig-Maximilians Universität München, Université de Lille 2. The investigation aims at assessing whether a “rewarding” approach – favored by Art. 16 Dir. (EU) 2017/541 – can be pursued as a harmonized and useful tool of prevention of terrorism. The question, on the other hand, is whether a European model of restorative and collaborative measures already exists or can be born, or if instead there are more than one model and it is necessary to let them coexist without impossible unifying pushes. More than distinct “models”, however, the research shows that there are differences of “legal systems”, substantive and procedural, which impose any general “model” to be differentiated according to those distinct normative and legal realities, or at least force to “flexible” applications because of the different disciplines and specific preventive purposes that are necessary. At the end of the research a European model of rewarding measures to prevent terrorism has been drafted, which can be partly already implemented despite the current formulation of art. 16 of the mentioned Directive