\documentclass{article}\usepackage{../style}\begin{document}\section*{Handout 2 (E-Voting)}In security engineering, there are many counter-intuitive phenomena:for example I am happy (more or less) to use online banking every day,where if something goes wrong, I can potentially lose a lot of money,but I am staunchly against using electronic voting (lets call ite-voting for short). E-voting is an idea that is nowadays oftenpromoted in order to counter low turnouts in elections\footnote{In my last local election where I was eligible to vote only 48\% of the population have cast their ballot. I was, I shamefully admit, one of the non-voters.} and generally sounds like a good idea. Right?Voting from the comfort of your own home, or on your mobile on the go,what could possibly go wrong? Even the UK's head of the ElectoralCommission, Jenny Watson, argued in 2014 in a Guardian article thatthe UK should have e-voting. Her plausible argument is that 76\% ofpensioners in the UK vote (in a general election?), but only 44\% ofthe under-25s. For which constituency politicians might therefore makemore favourable (short-term) decisions is clear. So being not yetpensioner, I should be in favour of e-voting, no?Well, it turns out there are many things that can go wrong withe-voting, as I like to argue in this handout. E-voting in a ``secureway'' seems to be one of the things in computer science that are stillvery much unsolved. It is not on the scale of Turing's haltingproblem, which is proved that it can never be solved in general, butmore in the category of being unsolvable with current technology. Thisis not just my opinion, but also shared by many security researchersamogst them Alex Halderman, who is the world-expert on this subjectand from whose course on Securing Digital Democracy I have most of myinformation and inspiration. It is also a controversial topic in manycountries:\begin{itemize}\item The Netherlands between 1997--2006 had electronic voting machines, but ``hacktivists'' had found they can be hacked to change votes and also emitted radio signals revealing how you voted.\item Germany conducted pilot studies with e-voting, but in 2007 a law suit has reached the highest court and it rejected e-voting on the grounds of not being understandable by the general public.\item UK used optical scan voting systems in a few trail polls, but to my knowledge does not use any e-voting in elections.\item The US used mechanical machines since the 1930s, later punch cards, now DREs and optical scan voting machines.\item Estonia used since 2007 the Internet for national elections. There were earlier pilot studies for voting via Internet in other countries.\item India uses e-voting devices since at least 2003. They used ``keep-it-simple'' machines produced by a government owned company.\item South Africa used software for its tallying in the 1993 elections (when Nelson Mandela was elected) and found that the tallying software was rigged, but they were able to tally manually.\end{itemize}The reason that e-voting is such a hard problem is that we haverequirements about the voting process that conflict with eachother. The five main requirements for voting in general are:\begin{itemize}\item {\bf Integrity} \begin{itemize} \item The outcome of the vote matches with the voters' intend. \item There might be gigantic sums at stake and need to be defended against. \end{itemize}\item {\bf Ballot Secrecy} \begin{itemize} \item Nobody can find out how you voted. \item (Stronger) Even if you try, you cannot prove how you voted. The reason is that you want to avoid vote selling as has been tried, for example, by a few jokers in the recent Scottish referendum. \end{itemize}\item {\bf Voter Authentication} \begin{itemize} \item Only authorised voters can vote up to the permitted number of votes (in order to avoid the ``vote early, vote often''). \end{itemize}\item {\bf Enfranchisement} \begin{itemize} \item Authorised voters should have the opportunity to vote. \end{itemize}\item {\bf Availability} \begin{itemize} \item The voting system should accept all authorised votes and produce results in a timely manner. \end{itemize}\end{itemize}To tackle the problem of e-voting, we must first have a lookinto the history of voting and how paper-based ballots evolved. We know for sure that elections were held in Athensas early as 600 BC, but might even date to the time ofMesopotamia and also in India some kind of ``republics'' might have existed before the Alexander the Great invaded it.Have a look at Wikipedia about the history of democracy for more information.%\subsubsection*{Questions}%Coming back to the question of why I use online banking, but %prefer not to e-vote. %Why do I use e-polling in lectures?%Imagine you have a perfectly secure internet voting system, by%which I mean nobody can tamper with or steal votes between%your browser and the central server responsible for vote%tallying. What can still go wrong with such a perfectly secure%voting system, which is prevented in traditional elections%with paper-based ballots?\end{document}%%% Local Variables: %%% mode: latex%%% TeX-master: t%%% End: