EVoting: Electronic Remote Elections and Voting, Feasibility and Implementation

David Foster, Laura Stapleton

Departments

dlfoste2@oakland.edu, lastaple@oakland.edu

1. Background and Motivation

Research Problem and Importance -- How to implement and allow, safeguard, guarantee, authenticate, verify internet elections.  Exceptionally helpful for disabled and handicapped, elderly, and absent voters (such as overseas military, traveling businessmen, college students), and the public in general.

Challenges -- Hardware and Software.  Bandwidth, verification & authentication, security, public trust, storage and integrity of data, reliability, availability, technology/protocols, cost, cyber trust.

Objectives (exploration space) -- Provide database confirmation of personal voting choices, secure verifiable voting methods and policies, and overall analysis of current (as available and accessible) comparable online voting, and related secured systems (method or theory, if not magnitude):  SoS, Vehicle Registration Renewal, Fafsa, TurboTax, current Electronic/Internet Voting techniques and solutions.

2. Proposed Methodology

 Possible solutions (ideas):

• Select/design method of secure password/key distribution
• Select/design method of verifying selections to a voter prior to official submittal
• Select/design database which tracks which individuals have voting, preventing multiple submissions
• Select/design secure method of tallying votes and maintaining records for recounts without linking information to individual voters
• Identify methods of attack and select/design countermeasures
• Devise methodology to educate voters in use and security of the system.

Evaluation:

• Sample client/server program focusing on selected solution.
• Simulation and testing of client/server program
• Implementation (Development Environment and Experimental Platform)

3. Expected Contributions

 Outcomes:  Select, design, or create a proposed remote voting system that maintains confidentiality of individual voter’s selections while maintaining a secure list of individuals that have voted. Also, provide a reliable means for recounts and feedback to the voter that the correct selections were properly recorded.

Contributions: To be determined according to schedule after specific topic has been chosen.

Impacts: To be determined according to schedule after specific topic has been chosen.

4. Targeted Conference/Journal

Journal:  IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, IEEE Computer Society Press.

Conference:  http://www.comsoc.org/iscc/2006/  --International Symposium on Computers and Communications

http://tangra.si.umich.edu/clair/sigmod-pods06/pods-call.html  --25th ACM SIGMOD-SIGACT-SIGART SYMPOSIUM ON PRINCIPLES OF DATABASE SYSTEMS

5. Organization of the Project and Project Management

5.1 Research Team

David Foster began at Oakland University as a Ph.D. student in Systems Engineering in 2004. Since 2001, he has been a lecturer in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Kettering University in Flint , MI , where he teaches Digital Systems and Microcomputers. His primary research interests include embedded systems and sensor networks with growing interests in computer architecture and fuzzy logic. David earned his Bachelors degree from Kettering University with a major in Electrical Engineering and minors in both Applied Physics and in Applied and Computational Mathematics, and was awarded Kettering University 's President's Medal upon graduation. He completed a Masters of Science in Computer Engineering with a specialization in Hardware from the University of Michigan . He worked in the Process Computing group at the AK Steel Corporation in Middletown , OH for three years, and spent a year and a half at Delphi Automotive Systems working with electrical power steering systems. His strengths include programming, Matlab, and simulation and testing, and research. His primary weakness is a lack of prior experience with security systems and current.

Laura Stapleton began studies at Lawrence Technological University in the Electronics Engineering program in 1989, and has worked for several high tech companies such as Jabil Circuit, Coltec Automotive, Methode Electronics, PG Design, and Continental Teves and Check Corporation.  Her main focus of work is Hardware/Software Verification  and Printed Circuit Board Design, mainly for the automotive and pc manufacturing sectors, always working with and for the brightest and most talented design engineering teams-- from prototype to final production.  Laura has been programming, building and repairing PC's since the dawn of the Atari, and TRS-80, beginning with BASIC at age 13.  She earned her bachelors at Oakland University in 2005, and began studies at Oakland University for Masters of Science Information Systems Engineering.  Her main skills include networking (personal and computer), web design, software testing (os, embedded apps), pcb layout & schematics, and pc security on a home system level, as an aside, business aspects such as entrepreneurial skills, management, finance and accounting.  Her primary weakness is sleeping before 7am, and waking up before noon, although her debugging and logic skills are contributory awake, or in sleep mode.

Capability of finishing the project as a team.  At  this time, there are no foreseen difficulties in reaching project completion.

5.2 Research Plan 

5.3 Project Management

Responsibility of each member:

Duties are according to the table in section 5.2 Research Plan. Both members are very similar in capabilities with regards to this project, and therefore initially split responsibilities equally. It is expected that as the project progresses and subtasks are generated that they will be delegated to a specific team member according to ability and available time. Files and materials will be stored in a location accessible to both, and each can work as their schedules allow.

Meetings

The team will meet weekly Monday evenings following class, in addition to email throughout the week apprising each other of progress and issues.

References

University groups  

• Johns Hopkins University Information Security Institute: A Center for Correct, Usable, Reliable, Auditable and Transparent Elections (ACCURATE) -http://www.jhuisi.jhu.edu
• Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project - http://www.vote.caltech.edu
• UC Berkeley, Rice University , Stanford University , the University of Iowa and SRI International. At Rice, Dan Wallach - www.cs.rice.edu/~dwallac
• Georgia Tech Research Institute Internet Voting Research Team
• Eagleton Institute of Politics, Rutgers , The State University of New Jersey, Electronic Government Project - http://www.eagleton.rutgers.edu/e-gov/e-research.htm  

Corporate Research

• http://www.hartintercivic.com/ - Hart Intercivic
• http://votehere.net/ - VoteHere, a division of Dategrity Corp.
• Cisco Systems and Brookings Institution - http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/fspnisapi94de.html, http://www.brookings.edu
• Scytl – www.scytl.com
• SRI - http://www.csl.sri.com/users/neumann/book-voting.html

Papers

• K. Coleman, Internet Voting, CRS Report For Congress, 2003.
• Jorba, Comments by Scytl on the SERVE Security Report, 2004.
• T. Kohno, A. Stubblefield, A.D. Rubin, Analysis of an Electronic Voting System, IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy 2004 IEEE Computer Society Press, May 2004.
• Rubin, Security Considerations for Remote Electronic Voting, AT&T Labs
• Rubin, D. Wallach, N. Paul, D. Evans,  Authentication for Remote Voting, 2003

 Page Last Updated:  Sunday, March 19, 2006 06:48:31 PM