Secure voting Protocols for Online Elections
Photo by: Simon
A. Eugster, Sealing
wax on letters, CC BY-SA 3.0
Please refer to http://obvioustruths.blogspot.in/2017/01/failure-modes-of-internet-based.html for
a short post on risks in online voting. This is a follow-up article discussing a few interesting technical issues. The post quoted above deals with the current
state of the art and says
“A service provider usually makes available the software
and related infrastructure for running an election to the entity holding the
election over the Internet. The service provider is selected to be a trusted
partner, and is beyond suspicion”.
It is quite unnecessary and undesirable to use systems
that require the service provider to share secrets with the voters. A
cryptographic technique named
enables voters to encrypt and publish their votes. Election results can be computed using the encrypted votes without decrypting
individual votes. We can expect such techniques to be in practical use in
future. A whole variety of safeguards are, however, required to ensure that an
election is carried out in a fair and transparent manner without any mischief-makers
being able to alter the results.
Discussions of some of the considerations involved can be found in
Discussions of some of the considerations involved can be found in
Swiss Online Voting Protocol (select from the displayed page the PDF
document with this name and download it) and in
Creating an online service and an app for conducting secure elections and persuading organizations
to use them is not mere technical work. It requires entrepreneurial spirit,
management & marketing abilities in addition to technical knowledge and
skills. A student project involving a team of three or four students could
address this problem.
Straightforward engineering is not sufficient to
implement a system in which a service provider does not have to share secrets.
The need for advanced cryptographic techniques and the need to design a system
free of weaknesses make this project a special one. If it was any simpler, many
software houses would be marketing their solutions by now.
