Development of audit and data protection principles in electronic voting systems

Abstract

It is assumed in standard information protection technologies that there are owners of this information who put forward requirements for protection. In secret voting systems, the information belongs to the community of citizens, and to protect it, vote organizers must create conditions that allow each voter to make sure that the vote secrecy and accuracy of vote counting are preserved. In developed democracies, this issue is resolved through a widely available audit of all procedures that may be mistrusted. Any voter can conduct such an audit. The anxiety of citizens of democratic countries is based on the idea that if electronic voting is introduced, it will be impossible to conduct such an audit. The article proposes principles of auditing all those software and hardware tools and processes of the online voting system that can generate voter distrust. This audit is carried out using a dedicated server open to voters and their fiduciaries. This server provides continuous monitoring of actions of the service staff in terms of possible interference in the operation of the voting system. Also, due to this server, auditors receive data on the integrity of the voting system hardware and software including its audit tools and an alarm signal in the event of a threat. It was possible to reduce the average time of processing the voter requests to two seconds. This means that processing a maximum of 2,500 voter requests at a vote station will take no more than two hours. Simultaneous access of 50 voters to the server will not make them wait in the queue for more than 2 minutes. Implementation results were described and links were given for conducting experimental voting on the Internet.

Proof of the possibility for a public audit of a secret internet voting system

“…In case of distrust of the standard audit server, the provider must assist voters to install an additional audit server. The principle of operation of the audit server is described in detail in [10]. For voters to access the audit server, the https protocol is recommended in order to neutralize the attack of an intermediary.…”

“…As pointed out in [10], this is easily identified by publishing data on the number of voters for each street within a polling station, for each house within a street, and for each apartment within a house. Then the voters themselves will find extra residents in their apartments, extra apartments in their houses and extra houses on their streets without the use of technical means.…”

“…An important role for demonstrating the flawless operation of the voting server belongs to the audit server, which detects and documents interference in the operation of the voting server. The device connection diagram suiTable for the required audit of the Internet voting system from [10] is shown in Fig. 1.…”

A Systematic Literature Review and Meta-Analysis on Scalable Blockchain-Based Electronic Voting Systems

“…However, these methods only apply to cryptocurrencies that do not require permissions. On the other hand, some other approaches were extended to all workloads but depended only on trusted hardware to reduce communication overhead [ 192 ].…”