A holistic framework for the evaluation of internet voting systems

The foundations of democratic societies are elections. Due to their central importance to society, elections are bound to high legal standards, which are usually specified as election principles in national constitutions. To date, technological advance has reached elections, and Internet voting is a buzzword in the field of information technology. Many Internet voting systems and schemes have been proposed in research and some have even been used in legally binding elections. However, their underlying requirements are on the one hand often too closely linked to the specific technology and on the other hand mostly tailored to the scheme/system under investigation and therefore not connectable with election principles. This makes it difficult to compare different schemes/systems with each other, and correspondingly, it is difficult for election officials to select one of the proposed Internet voting schemes/systems for their own election setting. This chapter counters this artifact with two contributions, which are captured within an evaluation framework. First, based on the interdisciplinary method KORA, the authors derive constitutionally founded technical requirements. Second, they propose metrics to estimate the fulfillment of these requirements within concrete Internet voting systems. Given these contributions, the framework developed within this chapter supports election officials in making justified decisions about the selection and deployment of a specific Internet voting scheme/system.</span

Formal Treatment of Distributed Trust in Electronic Voting

Electronic voting systems are among the most security critical distributed systems. Different trust concepts are implemented to mitigate the risk of conspiracies endangering security properties. These concepts render systems often very complex and end users no longer recognize whom they need to trust. Correspondingly, specific trust considerations are necessary to support users. Recently, resilience terms have been proposed in order to express, which entities can violate the addressed security properties in particular by illegal collaborations. However, previous works derived these resilience terms manually. Thus, successful attacks can be missed. Based on this approach, we propose a framework to formally and automatically derive these terms. Our framework comprises a knowledge calculus, which allows us to model knowledge and reason about knowledge of collaborating election entities. The introduced framework is applied to deduce previously manually derived resilience terms of three remote electronic voting systems, namely Polyas, Helios and the Estonian voting system. Thereby, we were able to discover mistakes in previous derivations

Pretty Understandable Democracy - A Secure and Understandable Internet Voting Scheme

Internet voting continues to raise interest. A large number of Internet voting schemes are available, both in use, as well as in research literature. While these schemes are all based on different security models, most of these models are not adequate for high-stake elections. Furthermore, it is not known how to evaluate the understandability of these schemes (although this is important to enable voters' trust in the election result). Therefore, we propose and justify an adequate security model and criteria to evaluate understandability. We also describe an Internet voting scheme, Pretty Understandable Democracy, show that it satisfies the adequate security model and that it is more understandable than Pretty Good Democracy, currently the only scheme that also satisfies the proposed security model