Voting over the Internet on an Insecure Platform
Rolf Haenni, Reto E. Koenig · Advances in electronic government, digital divide, and regional development book series · 2014
Voters using their insecure personal devices for casting votes cause a critical but still largely unsolved problem in Internet voting. This chapter addresses this problem by introducing a trusted voting device, which can be used in combination with various cryptographic voting protocols. It's an answer to one of the main assumptions, on which these protocols are based, namely that voters can reliably perform various cryptographic computations. We suggest that all critical cryptographic computations are performed on the voting device, but we restrict its user interface to the simple task of allowing voters to confirm their votes before casting the ballot. The ballots themselves are prepared beforehand on the voter's insecure platform using its rich user interface. To provide privacy even in the presence of strong malware, the voting device receives its information from the voter's insecure platform in form of matrix barcodes. The unidirectionality of such an optical communication channel disallows the insecure platform to learn the voter's actual choice. To verify the correct functioning of the voting device, it can be challenged with test ballots that are indistinguishable from real ones.