A Protocol for Cast-as-Intended Verifiability with a Second Device

Numerous institutions, such as companies, universities, or non-governmental organizations, employ Internet voting for remote elections. Since the main purpose of an election is to determine the voters' will, it is fundamentally important to ensure that the final election result correctly reflects the voters' votes. To this end, modern secure Internet voting schemes aim for what is called end-to-end verifiability. This fundamental security property ensures that the correctness of the final result can be verified, even if some of the computers or parties involved are malfunctioning or corrupted. A standard component in this approach is so called cast-as-intended verifiability which enables individual voters to verify that the ballots cast on their behalf contain their intended choices. Numerous approaches for cast-as-intended verifiability have been proposed in the literature, some of which have also been employed in real-life Internet elections. One of the well established approaches for cast-as-intended verifiability is to employ a second device which can be used by voters to audit their submitted ballots. This approach offers several advantages - including support for flexible ballot/election types and intuitive user experience - and it has been used in real-life elections, for instance in Estonia. In this work, we improve the existing solutions for cast-as-intended verifiability based on the use of a second device. We propose a solution which, while preserving the advantageous practical properties sketched above, provides tighter security guarantees. Our method does not increase the risk of vote-selling when compared to the underlying voting protocol being augmented and, to achieve this, it requires only comparatively weak trust assumptions. It can be combined with various voting protocols, including commitment-based systems offering everlasting privacy

Applying Estonian Internet Voting Individual Verification System to Other Electoral Systems

Selles töös antakse ülevaade Eesti interneti hääletamise individuaalse verifitseeritavuse süsteemist ja tutvustatakse erinevaid valimissedeleid. Töös esitatakse ja selgitatakse muudatused Eesti süsteemile, et seda oleks võimalik kasutada tutvustatud valimissedelite ja mitme korraga käimas oleva valimise individuaalseks verifitseerimiseks.The current paper gives an overview of the Estonian internet voting individual verification system and introduces different ballot styles. It proposes and describes modifications to the Estonian system, so it could be used for individual verification with the introduced ballot styles and multiple elections

Blockchain-Based E-Certificate Verification and Validation Automation Architecture to Avoid Counterfeiting of Digital Assets in Order to Accelerate Digital Transformation

The security and confidentiality of data are very important for institutions. Meanwhile, data fabrication or falsification of official documents is still common. Validation of the authenticity of documents such as certificates becomes a challenge for various parties, especially those who have to make decisions based on the validity of the document. Scanning-based signatures on printed and digital documents are still relatively easy to counterfeit and yet still difficult to distinguish from the original. The traditional approach is no longer reliable. Solutions to these problems require the existence of data security techniques, seamless online verification of the authenticity of printed documents, and e-certificates quickly. The objective of the study is to model the e-certificate verification process via blockchain and proof-of-stake consensus methods and use MD5 encryption. The data or identity listed on the e-certificate is secured with an embedded digital signature in the form of a QR code and can be checked for the truth online. A combination of technologies capable of suppressing or removing counterfeiting of digital assets will accelerate digital transformation across spectrums of modern life. The resulting architectural model can be used as a starting point for implementing a blockchain-based e-certificate verification and validation automation system

Security Authentication using Phase-Encoded Nanoparticle Structures and Polarized Light

Phase encoded nano structures such as Quick Response (QR) codes made of metallic nanoparticles are suggested to be used in security and authentication applications. We present a polarimetric optical method able to authenticate random phase encoded QR codes. The system is illuminated using polarized light and the QR code is encoded using a phase-only random mask. Using classification algorithms it is possible to validate the QR code from the examination of the polarimetric signature of the speckle pattern. We used Kolmogorov-Smirnov statistical test and Support Vector Machine algorithms to authenticate the phase encoded QR codes using polarimetric signatures

ENHANCING USERS’ EXPERIENCE WITH SMART MOBILE TECHNOLOGY

The aim of this thesis is to investigate mobile guides for use with smartphones. Mobile guides have been successfully used to provide information, personalisation and navigation for the user. The researcher also wanted to ascertain how and in what ways mobile guides can enhance users' experience. This research involved designing and developing web based applications to run on smartphones. Four studies were conducted, two of which involved testing of the particular application. The applications tested were a museum mobile guide application and a university mobile guide mapping application. Initial testing examined the prototype work for the ‘Chronology of His Majesty Sultan Haji Hassanal Bolkiah’ application. The results were used to assess the potential of using similar mobile guides in Brunei Darussalam’s museums. The second study involved testing of the ‘Kent LiveMap’ application for use at the University of Kent. Students at the university tested this mapping application, which uses crowdsourcing of information to provide live data. The results were promising and indicate that users' experience was enhanced when using the application. Overall results from testing and using the two applications that were developed as part of this thesis show that mobile guides have the potential to be implemented in Brunei Darussalam’s museums and on campus at the University of Kent. However, modifications to both applications are required to fulfil their potential and take them beyond the prototype stage in order to be fully functioning and commercially viable

Open Voting Client Architecture and Op-Ed Voting: A Novel Framework for Solving Requirement Conflicts in Secret Ballot Elections

Building voting systems for secret ballot elections has many challenges and is the subject of significant academic research efforts. These challenges come from conflicting requirements. In this paper, we introduce a novel architectural approach to voting system construction that may help satisfy conflicting requirements and increase voter satisfaction. Our design, called Open Voting Client Architecture, defines a voting system architectural approach that can harness the power of individualized voting clients. In this work, we contribute a voting system reference architecture to depict the current voting system construction and then use it to define Open Voting Client Architecture. We then detail a specific implementation called Op-Ed Voting to evaluate the security of Open Voting Client Architecture systems. We show that Op-Ed Voting, using voters\u27 personal devices in an end-to-end verifiable protocol, can potentially improve usability and accessibility for voters while also satisfying security requirements for electronic voting