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CHAPTER 2

LITERATURE REVIEW

This chapter presents a review of related works in the area of E-

voting system. It also highlights some gaps which are required to be filled up
in this respect.

Chaum et al (1981) discussed about voting entails a democratic

apparatus used to enthrone democratic leaders and in some quarters it is
regarded as one of the most effective methods for individuals to express their
opinions on a given topic.

Nurmi et al (1991) developed two agency protocols. In this two

agency protocols, the electronic validator distributes a secret identification tag
to each voter just prior to the election. The validator then sends the tallier a
list of all identification tags, with no record of the corresponding voters. Each
voter sends the tallier his / her identification tag and an encrypted file
contacting a copy of the tag and the voted ballot. At this point the tallier can
make sure the identification tag is valid, but the program has no way of
examining the contents of the ballot. The tallier publishes the encrypted file,
and the voter responds by sending the tallier the key necessary to decrypt it.
When the election is over, the tallier publishes a list of all voted ballots and
the corresponding encrypted files. This protocol also has several problems.
Most importantly it doesnt protect the voters privacy if the tallier and
validator collude.
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Fujioka et al (1992) developed a practical voting scheme using blind

signatures. Blind signatures allow a document to be signed without revealing
its contents. The effect is similar to placing a document and a sheet of carbon
paper inside of the envelope. If somebody signs the outside of the envelope,
they also sign the document on the inside of the envelope. The signature
remains attached to the document, even when it is removed from the
envelope. The voter prepares a voted ballot, encrypts it with a secret key, and
blinds it. The voter then signs the ballot and sends it to the validator. The
validator verifies that the signature belongs to registered voter who has not yet
voted. If the ballot is valid, the validator signs the ballot and returns it to the
voter. The voter removes the blinding encryption layer, revealing an
encrypted ballot signed by the validator. The voter then sends the resultant
encrypted ballot to the tallier. The tallier checks the signature on the
encrypted ballot. If the ballot is valid, the tallier places it on a list that is
published after all voters vote. After the list has been published, voters verify
that their ballots are on the list and send the tallier the decryption keys
necessary to open their ballots. The tallier uses these keys to decrypt the
ballots and add the votes to the election tally.

Neumann et al (1993) gives a list of suggestions for "generic voting

criteria" which suggests that a voting system should be so hard to tamper with
and so resistant to failure that no commercial system is likely to ever meet the
requirements, and developing a suitable custom system would be extremely
difficult and prohibitively expensive.

Philip Klein et al (1995) presents a remote voting scheme that

applies the technique of blinded signature to a voter's ballot so that it is
impossible for anyone to trace the ballot back to the voter. They achieve the
desired properties of privacy, universal verifiability, convenience and
untraceability, but at the expense of receipt-freeness.
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Sako et al (1995) introduces the concept of universal verifiability to

emphasize the importance of auditing of overall election by categorizing the
verifiability as individual variability and universal verifiability. In their
approach, a sender can verify whether or not his message has reached its
destination, but cannot determine if this is true for the other voters and also in
the course of the protocol the participants broadcast information that allows
any voter or interested third party to at a later time verify that the election was
performed properly or not.

A very first attempt was designed by Cranor et al (1996) without

employing any cryptographic techniques. In this, voters would submit their
vote along with a unique identification number to a validator who would then
take their name off on a list of registered voters. Then the validator would
then strip off the Unique Identification number and submit just the votes to
the tallier who would count the votes. Although this system has the
advantages of being flexible, convenient and mobile, this system is far from
secure. If the validator is compromised votes can be easily traced back to the
voter or votes could be changed. Both privacy and accuracy lack with this
protocol. There is no way to ensure the voters privacy and the tallier
accurately records the votes.

Cranor et al (1997) proposed and implemented a protocol based on

Fujiokas scheme called Sensus. One of the drawbacks of the Blind Signature
protocol is the voter has to wait till the voting has ended before the voter can
verify the casted vote was the correct one, which is not in line with the
property of flexibility. Sensus system is closely based on the Blind Signature
protocol. The major difference between the schemes emerges after the voter
has submitted the encrypted ballot to the tallier. Instead of waiting till the
voting ends the tallier sends a receipt to the voter when his/her ballot has been
received. This receipt is no more than a confirmation the vote has been
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transferred to the tallier correctly. The voter may submit the decryption key
immediately after receiving this receipt, completing the entire voting process
in one session. The implemented Sensus system employs a pollster agent that
performs all cryptographic functions and transactions with the election
programs on the voters behalf. Tests conducted with a prototype
implementation of Sensus indicate that the entire voting process can be
completed within a few minutes.

Yahuda Lindell et al (2000) discussed the comparison of Symmetric

key and public key cryptosystem. It also discussed about how to achieve
authentication using Symmetric key Cryptosystem and Asymmetric key
Cryptosystem. Symmetric key encryption algorithms are suitable for
providing high security in smart card applications when compared to Public
key algorithm. But, Asymmetric encryption provides more functionality than
symmetric encryption, at the expense of speed and hardware cost.

Aviel et al (2002) discusses the security considerations for remote

electronic voting in public elections. In particular, he examines the feasibility
of running national federal elections over the Internet. The focus of his paper
is on the limitations of the current deployed infrastructure in terms of the
security of the hosts and the Internet itself. He finally concluded that at
present, the infrastructure is inadequate for remote Internet voting.

Gritzalis et al (2002) expresses that voting is a process at the heart

of a democratic society. He therefore stressed that in recent democratic
elections using voting machines have shown that the winning margins could
be less than the error margins of the voting systems themselves, making
election an error prone task. Hence the use of electronic voting has the
potential to reduce or remove unwanted human errors. In addition to its
reliability, e-voting can handle multiple modalities such as voice assistance
for handicap, and provide better scalability for large elections. He stated that
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e-voting is also an excellent mechanism that does not require geographically

proximity of the voters.

Mercuri et al (2002) invented the Mercuri method for electronic

voting. A critical component of this method is very similar to the
Caltech/MIT proposal: a voting machine must produce human readable
hardcopy paper results, which can be verified by the voter before the vote is
cast, and manually recounted later if necessary. Her philosophy and
Neumanns are very similar.

Peter et al (2003) discusses a secure PKI based system for e-voting

that was developed. They tested the application, several organizational
aspects, and usability in fourteen field trials. In their paper they describe the
method and findings. What they learn about turnout, about the logistics of
organizing e-voting, and about usability and reliability of the system in
practice.

Alexander et al (2004) in his paper discusses what threats e-voting

faces. The purpose of his paper is to give a systematically ordered overview
of attacks against e-voting and to show one solution to the issues. The
challenge is to provide identification and anonymity at the same time and to
exclude the possibility of fraudulent manipulations by the server
administration, the voter, and any third party.

Kohno et al (2004) discusses on the criticism in the Direct

Recording Electronic (DRE) voting systems in which they pointed out that
due to various deficiencies and security vulnerabilities it has being widely
criticized. Therefore they believe is that the software undergoes insufficient
scrutiny during qualification and certification; that DREs are especially
vulnerable to various form of insider programmer attacks; and that DREs
have no voter-verified audit trails paper or otherwise that could largely
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circumvent these problems. All of these criticisms of DREs apply directly to

SERVE as well.

Liaw et al (2004) discussed the properties of electronic voting

system and how their proposed electronic voting scheme try to satisfy these
properties is also mentioned. The main principle of e-voting is that it must be
as similar to regular voting as possible, complaint with election legislation
and principles and be at least as secure as regular voting. Therefore e-voting
must be uniform and secret, only eligible persons must be allowed to vote, a
voter must not be able to prove in favor of whom he/she voted. In addition to
this the collecting of votes must be secure, reliable and accountable.

Sonja Hof et al (2004) reported about biometric approaches to

e-voting. There are different biometrics approaches i.e., fingerprint, iris, face,
voice, signature, DNA analysis and multi biometric systems are discussed. He
discussed about how biometrics concepts can be used in e-voting. It does not
interact in any way with the biometric characteristics of the actual users,
authenticates the user with the help of users authentication certificate as
present on the card.

Kalaichelvi et al (2005) developed a new technique for encryption

& decryption. It used the substitution and inverse substitution table for
encryption & decryption. These tables constructed based on ASCII value and
the key value. And it also discussed the three types folding technique.

Karlof et al (2005) took a different approach from the other

researchers as they do not distinguishing universal or individual verifiability.
So their definition states that verifiability means each voter should be able to
verify his ballot accurately represents the vote he cast. Verifiability counted-
as-cast means everyone should be able to verify that the final is an accurate
count of the ballots. Therefore it can be seen from the definitions arrived at by
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the different researchers that individual verifiability and universal verifiability

basically are centered on the fact that every voter can check if his vote has
been properly counted and anyone can check that the calculated result is
correct and election is performed correctly.

Sampigethaya et al (2006) looks at the numerous e-voting protocols

proposed which are meant to fulfill different requirement sets using
cryptographic tools and primitives, these underlying primitives are mainly
blind signatures and homomorphic encryption.

Chetinkaya et al (2007) reported the verification and validation in

e-voting and gave the proper definitions for verifiability and validity. It
describes about verification and validation activities and explains the
relationship between and core requirements to any e-voting system. It also
stated that some problems for designing and developing secure e-voting
systems.

Sarah et al (2008) reported about the comparison of efficiency of the

DRE with the with traditional machines. (paper ballots, punch cards, and lever
machines). Results indicate that there were little differences between the DRE
and these older methods in efficiency or effectiveness. However, in terms of
user satisfaction, the DRE was significantly better than the older methods.
Paper ballots also perform well, but participants were much more satisfied
with their experiences voting on the DRE. It indicates that there were little
differences between DRE and traditional methods in efficiency.

From the above literature review, it could be understood that the

published information on Secured Electronic Voting Systems is very scanty.
However, the topic is gaining more importance very recently among the
researchers and this indicates the high priority of researchers towards this
topic.