Scalability Aspects of Remote Voting Systems
- When?
- Tuesday 19 July 2011, 14:00 to 15:00
- Where?
- 39BB02
- Open to:
- Students, Staff
- Speaker:
- Mr Harshana Liyanage
Advances in electronic voting have made it possible to run more robust and transparent elections than previously possible with traditional paper based voting. The higher security guarantees given through electronic voting intends to raise standards of democracy in modern society and reduce the possibility of election malpractices. Despite having these obvious benefits, the rate at which electronic voting systems are adopted across the world, especially for legally binding elections, has been very slow. Only a few countries have successfully conducted elections at national level such as Estonia and Switzerland. The voter population in these countries are comparatively lower and the voting systems are in most instances integrated to existing security infrastructures. However, in recent elections there has been speculation as to the adequacy of security used for these elections.
In general, the main challenge for large scale elections is how to use stronger cryptography while performing a vote tally which produces results within an acceptable time frame. All this needs to take place while maintaining desirable properties of electronic voting systems such as voter verifiability. In this report we examine existing remote electronic voting protocols and analyse their suitability to be used in large scale elections. We also discuss the Estonian voting system to understand the dynamics of real world voting protocols.
Cloud computing is commonly used nowadays to deploy highly scalable systems while minimizing infrastructure costs. However, the use of such technology brings numerous security concerns as computation is performed on an infrastructure which is not completely trusted. Recent developments in the area of cloud-based cryptography have demonstrated the possibility that computation can be done on the cloud while maintaining the secrecy of the data it holds. Additionally, a series of mechanisms to guarantee the integrity of the data on the cloud have also been suggested. We present such building blocks and techniques that could be used to develop secure and verifiable voting protocols. We also present a high level design for a secure voting protocol that executes on a cloud infrastructure.
