Project 2 – Electronic Voting

[200 pts – Initial proposal] – Teams of 1-4 students

[40 pts – Reviews of other projects] – Same team as above

Due: Monday, November 8^th 5 PM

Premise:

Your goal is to devise an electronic voting system for a local precinct. Your team has been selected to handle the security aspects of the system. Specifically, your team has been tasked with attempting to provide a security framework for the system that provides the following features:

• Data integrity – The system must ensure that the vote count is accurate and contains only valid votes in the system at all times.
• Auditing – The system must be able to be audited to verify correct operation both in test cases and in an actual vote.
• Anonymity – The system must ensure that the end vote cannot be traced back to an individual voter or a statistically significant group of voters. Anonymity ensures that a voter can vote without fear of retribution due to how the vote was cast.
• Authentication – The system must ensure that only valid voters can cast votes and that only authorized parties can view the results from the voting precinct.

In a 10 page (or less) paper, describe your voting system and show precisely how your system meets the above criteria. In the even that you relax a criterion or introduce tradeoffs to your system, the document should discuss why the tradeoff was made and how the risk from the tradeoff can be mitigated. Note that not all of the system need be electronic, rather you may introduce both physical and/or human controls to the system where a purely electronic system is insufficient (do not forget to consider any risks or potential issues with such selections).

In your final report, you must address the following issues:

• Show how a single vote proceeds through the system (use a simple case of voting between three individual candidates)
• Show how the system can be audited in the event of an error or request for verification of the results
• Show how the system provides authentication
• Show how the system provides integrity for the data
• Show how the system provides anonymity

For each of the areas, make sure to discuss the reasons for selecting the approach which should include the respective strengths / weaknesses of the approach. Keep in mind that a thorough assessment of potential weaknesses is just as critical as defending the strengths / merits of why an approach was selected.

Review of the System

Before Thanksgiving break, each group will be responsible for reviewing all of the other proposals. The reviews should be thorough and will be based on criteria that will be posted here.